No disguising motive in CFL playoff change

The CFL’s reasoning for changing its playoff format starting in 2027 boils down to one thing: money.

They’re not the first league in recent memory to squeeze more out of its post-season in search of higher revenue.

The NCAA is expected to expand its cash cow, March Madness, to 76 teams next season — a move many purists oppose. That comes a few years after it tripled the size of the College Football Playoff from four teams to 12.

At the pro level, the National Football League (2020) and Major League Baseball (2022) each added two wildcard spots, lowering the bar for entry. The National Basketball Association took a different approach, introducing a play-in tournament in 2020 involving the No. 7 through 10 seeds to decide the final playoff spots.

The obvious difference in what the CFL is doing is scale.

This “refresh” is a leap to where nearly 90 per cent of the league qualifies for the playoffs. The current format — six of nine teams — is already higher than most at 66 per cent. Inviting two more to the party to make it eight out of nine makes next to zero sense from a football standpoint.

Rather than sidestepping that reality, CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston has seemed to lean into it. The league could argue that the four teams — seeds five through eight — in the play-in round are technically not in the playoffs as they still need to win to get in.

And if they look to the hardwood, they would have an argument, too. The losers of the NBA’s play-in round do not get credited with an official playoff berth in the record books.

“I fully acknowledge that eight out of nine teams make the playoffs. You don’t hear that too often,” Johnston said Tuesday on TSN OverDrive.

“We think this format rewards your regular season to such a degree that we’re going to get past that.”

Not everyone is buying it.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers star running back Brady Oliveira, one of the faces of the league, strongly disagrees.

“Eight out of nine teams in the Canadian Football League playoffs takes away from what makes those games special,” he wrote on X. “Playoff football is supposed to be earned. If anything, grow the league by adding more teams… not the number of automatic spots.”

The Canadian Football League Players’ Association is singing a different tune. They understand players’ wallets will benefit.

“The biggest thing was ensuring that this is creating new revenue opportunities for our members and how they could share in that growth,” said CFLPA rep and Hamilton Tiger-Cats safety Stavros Katsantonis.

League expansion would help legitimize the plan for 2027, if only it were that simple. The CFL has been itching to add a 10th team for years, but the current business model hasn’t led to anyone investing to make it happen.

Add in the fact that the league is on the final year of a television deal with TSN that generates $50 million annually, and it should come as no surprise that the CFL is doing what it can to be more attractive to potential broadcast partners and owners.

In 2025, CFL regular season games averaged 555,000 TV viewers. In the four playoff games leading up to the Grey Cup, that nearly doubled to 1,048,000. Add four more playoff games, and the financial upside is evident.

“We’ve only got five playoff games (two division semifinals, two finals and the Grey Cup)… I just felt like it wasn’t enough to build that momentum,” Johnston said.

The concern is what gets sacrificed in the process.

Critics argue this format will make the regular season feel meaningless. Seeding will, of course, be important — home teams have won 16 of the last 20 playoff games after all — but the door will be open to shenanigans. There’s certainly a scenario where a 5–13 team gets hot at the right time and ends up playing on championship Sunday.

Is that likely to happen? No, especially considering that no crossover team has managed to win back-to-back road tilts to reach the Grey Cup, but it’s not impossible.

And if the CFL’s version of a Page playoff ends up resembling curling’s model, there’s another wrinkle.

You see it in the sport with sweepers all the time when the loser of the Page 1-2 game (essentially what the CFL’s Division Showdown games will be) go on to win the rematch in the final. That was the case for both Matt Dunstone (Brier champion) and Kerri Einarson (Scotties champion) in their respective nationals this season.

How do you think a place like Bomberland or Riderville would react to winning the Division Showdown only to be eliminated two weeks later against the same team they beat in the first meeting?

This isn’t the CFL that current fans grew up with, and Johnston’s actions have made it clear — through this and the upcoming set of rule changes — that tradition won’t stand in the way of experimentation.

The league can frame their latest announcement as a push for excitement, but the true driving force is hard to miss: this is about the bottom line.

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