[Sport] The end of the CFL season

I spent quite some time back in the Spring posting about the NHL playoffs, following them through each round and commenting on the games that I managed to see, and the teams that progressed. After the end of the NHL season the summer in America traditionally belongs to baseball, with some basketball thrown in for good measure. I have no interest in either of those sports, but fortunately for me ‘America’s hat’, better known as Canada, starts its football season in June so that they’re finished before the worst of the winter weather hits.

Canadian football is subtly different to the American game that is much more well known.  Each series is three downs rather than four, the offensive and defensive  lines start a yard apart at scrimmage, the pitch is wider and longer, and the endzones are much deeper (to name the most obvious ones; there are also several subtle differences in the way that scoring works). All of this seems designed to promote a game that is built more around passing than the traditional ‘ground and pound’ running game of the NFL.

The Canadian Football League (CFL) only has 8 teams, which means a lot of repetition in matches over the 18 week season, but series between teams often swing back and forth and high scoring games are much more prevalent. The downside of such a small league is that three-quarters of the teams make the playoffs, which for me is too many.

The CFL has only 8 teams, but competition is incredibly fierce. (Credit: sportsagentblog.com)

Anyway, this season has been a pretty good one, although running backs do seem to have played more of a role than they did last year. Or maybe that’s just my cognitive bias and selective memory showing, because passing certainly was important throughout the season. Quite a lot of records were broken as well, or it at least seemed that way.

Much like the 2011/12 NFL season, the defending champions were pretty dominant the whole way through, but fell in the playoffs. In this case it was the BC Lions who lost out in the conference finals, leaving a slightly unlikely final of the Toronto Argonauts against the Calgary Stampeders. Certainly not the match that you’d have picked at the start of the playoffs, but both teams played very well and deserved to be in the final.

The Toronto Argonauts hoist the Grey Cup aloft. (Credit: themalaysianinsider.com)

In the end it was the Argonauts who triumphed, lifting the historic Grey Cup in their home stadium.  Sadly I didn’t get to see the match, but the CFL website has extensive highlights of every game, and watching those it looked like a hard-fought contest.  Calgary and Toronto have both been quietly over-performing all season, with their backup quarterback and a new rookie head-coach/newly-signed quarterback combination respectively, and beat the much more favoured BC Lions and Montreal Alouettes to make the 100^th Grey Cup final. Well done to the Toronto Argonauts on an excellent season.