Season sure to end with fireworks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/11/2011 (5144 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So when was the last time five teams were tied for first overall heading into the final week of the CFL regular season?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s never happened before — I mean, come on, five teams in an eight-team league tied for top spot after 17 games? That’s not going to happen — even though, against all odds, precisely that has somehow transpired this season with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Montreal Alouettes, Edmonton Eskimos, B.C. Lions and Calgary Stampeders all deadlocked at 10-7 coming into this weekend.

But what is more interesting — and a monument to just how unprecedented it is what we are witnessing in the CFL this week — is this: Not only have five teams never been tied for first overall heading into the final weekend of the regular season, there’s never been four teams tied. Or three, for that matter.

Since 1973, when the present regular season format was adopted, the highest number of teams tied for first overall with just one game left is just two. And even at that, it’s happened only five times in 38 years — in 1983, 1984, 1999, 2002 and last year when Calgary and Montreal were both tied at 12-5 with a week to play.

So yeah, this ‘Super Saturday’, as the CFL christened it this week, truly is something rare and special. And so how fitting then that it should be the final exclamation point on a CFL season that has been alternately good, bad and ugly, but always, always, always, something extraordinary.

We probably should have suspected this was going to be a head-turner of a season when in just the first game of the year, Hamilton linebacker Jamall Johnson very nearly separated Winnipeg quarterback Buck Pierce’s head from his body on a sack that will be replayed for years to come.

The Bombers-Stamps game is one of two games on Saturday with first-place implications; the other will happen later that night when the Lions host the Alouettes. Throw in Edmonton’s game tonight against Saskatchewan and you have a remarkable 24 hours coming up in the CFL.

In the West, Calgary, Edmonton and B.C. can each still finish as high as first or as low as third, depending on what happens tonight and tomorrow.

And in the East, the Bombers and Als will decide first and second place tomorrow. Winnipeg holds the decided advantage, clinching first in three of four possible scenarios: the Bombers win and Als win, the Bombers win and Als lose or the Bombers lose and Als lose.

Only in the scenario where Winnipeg loses to Calgary and Montreal beats B.C. does Winnipeg finish second and have to host Hamilton next weekend in the East semifinal. And all that means nothing, of course, in a season when the unexpected has reigned supreme.

Consider some of the goings in the CFL this season: a ref got summarily fired for a bad call and a bunch more kept their jobs after worse calls; two players who weren’t even playing got fined for threatening a player who was — on Twitter; a football team in Winnipeg opened at 7-1 and then went 3-6, while a team in B.C. opened at 0-5 and then went 10-2; the Riders beat the Alouettes once and the Bombers twice, but almost no one else; the Bombers lost twice to the Riders and twice to the Argos and only three times to everyone else; the premier pass rusher in the league, Odell Willis, got demoted even as he continued to lead the league in sacks; and the Bombers lost the leading rusher in the CFL last year to a catastrophic knee injury — and promptly improved their rushing game. A lot.

So yeah, of course the 2011 CFL regular season will end tomorrow with everyone’s hair on fire. Did you really think it would end any other way?

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca