Montreal Alouettes
We’ve only just reached the midway point of the CFL season, but the Montreal Alouettes can mathematically clinch first place in the East Division within the next three weeks.
The club is set to host the Ottawa Redblacks on Thursday night, a game they’re currently favoured to win by 12.5 points.
Montreal is 8-1, while the Redblacks are the tenth team in league history to start the season 0-9. Ottawa has also lost 15 consecutive games dating back to last year, setting a modern CFL record for longest losing skid.
If the Alouettes win this week, which seems highly likely, they’d then need to beat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (5-4) and B.C. Lions (4-5) to improve to 11-1 by Week 14.
In order to clinch first place by that point in time, Montreal would need four other games to go their way.
Three of them are simple: the Toronto Argonauts (4-5) have to lose.
Fresh off a 42-12 loss to Edmonton, the Double Blue are scheduled to play the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (4-6) twice and Saskatchewan Roughriders (6-3) once over the next three weeks. If the team loses all three contests, they would fall to 4-8, rendering them unable to catch Montreal.
The other result the Alouettes need is a Tiger-Cats loss to the Calgary Stampeders (4-6) in Week 13.
Two wins over Toronto and a loss to Calgary would give Hamilton a 6-7 record. Given that the Tabbies have already lost to Montreal twice this year, this would leave them unable to catch the Alouettes by virtue of the season series.
Obviously, nobody knows how the next three weeks will play out. After all, this is the Canadian Football League — weird things happen all the time.
However, it seems notable that the Alouettes could wrap-up the East Division with seven weeks left on the schedule. The exact date would be Monday, Sept. 7, which is Labour Day.
The last time a team locked up the East Division so early was 2023, when the Argonauts did so on Sept. 15 in Week 15. Coincidentally, they clinched first place with a win over Montreal.
Toronto was 11-1 at the time. Due to a scheduling quirk, the team had all three of its bye weeks before Labour Day that season, so it took 15 weeks to play 12 games.
It may also be time to question how many games Montreal can win this year. The team could easily be 9-0, were it not for a controversial overtime call against Edmonton back in June.
No team in CFL history has ever finished better than 16-2, and the Alouettes could still mathematically finish 17-1. However, given that the team could play several meaningless games down the stretch, this seems unlikely.
Only two teams have ever finished 16-2 in the CFL: Edmonton in 1989 and the aforementioned Argonauts in 2023. Curiously, neither of these teams reached the Grey Cup, losing by double digits in the West and East Finals, respectively.
With this in mind, one might argue the Alouettes would be best-served losing at least two more games before the 2026 regular-season comes to a close.
Montreal has recent experience with this very phenomenon. Montreal was the team that dominated the Argonauts in the East Final in 2023, then upset Winnipeg to win the Grey Cup.
One year later, the Alouettes had the best record in the CFL at 12-5-1 but lost the East Final to a scrappy Toronto team, which then went on to win a championship of its own.
The bottom line is that there is no best path to the Grey Cup, though a first-place finish is certainly the shortest.
With three more wins and a little bit of luck, the Alouettes could clinch exactly that in just three more weeks.
The Montreal Alouettes (8-1) will host the Ottawa Redblacks (0-9) at Percival Molson Stadium on Thursday, August 20 with kickoff scheduled for 7:30 p.m. EDT. Last week, the Redblacks extended their modern CFL record losing streak to 15 games, while the Alouettes were on bye.
The weather forecast in Montreal calls for 23 degrees and a mix of sun and cloud. The game will be broadcast on TSN and RDS in Canada, CBS Sports Network in the United States, and CFL+ internationally. Radio listeners can tune-in on TSN 1200 in Ottawa or TSN 690 (English) or 99.5 Montreal (French) in Montreal.
