Is Ottawa Cursed? A History of Three CFL Franchises, and One Very Familiar Feeling

By Chris Lawton

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” Dickens was writing about revolutionary Paris and London, not the CFL, but no line better captures the whiplash of following football in Canada’s capital at times it seems. Ottawa has won nine Grey Cups. Ottawa has also folded, twice. Right now, at 0-5, the city is living squarely in the worst of times, but the point of revisiting all of this history is that Ottawa has been here before, and the best of times has always, eventually, found its way back.

If you’ve watched CFL football in the nation’s capital for any length of time, that sinking 0-5 feeling in the pit of your stomach is probably an all too familiar one. Before getting to why, it’s worth being honest about what Ottawa is actually squandering. Because this isn’t a city with no football pedigree looking for excuses. It’s a city that has genuinely earned the right to expect better, and keeps finding new ways not to get it.

A Heritage Worth Acknowledging

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Ottawa football dates back to 1876, and for long stretches of the 20th century, the Rough Riders were one of the flagship organizations in the entire league. Nine Grey Cups sit in the trophy cabinet: 1925, 1926, 1940, 1951, 1960, 1968, 1969, 1973, and 1976. Under legendary coach and GM Frank Clair, Ottawa won three titles in the 1960s and two more in the 1970s, with Hall of Fame quarterback Russ Jackson leading the club to the playoffs every single year he suited up between 1958 and 1969. The 1976 title, a 23-20 win over the Saskatchewan Roughriders on Tony Gabriel’s iconic touchdown catch, remains the last Grey Cup Ottawa won under the Rough Riders name. The CFL had its own ‘The Catch’ before the NFL and 49ers got in on that act in the early 80s! This isn’t manufactured nostalgia; it’s a legitimate claim to being one of Canadian football’s great old-guard franchises, and for four decades, Ottawa genuinely lived in the best of times. Which makes what happened next so jarring.

The Worst of Times, Take One: Suffering Since the '80s

The Rough Riders’ decline wasn’t sudden; it was a 17-year bleed. After one final winning season in 1979, Ottawa did not post another winning record for the rest of its existence: 17 consecutive non-winning seasons stretching from 1980 to the franchise’s death in 1996.

There was one strange, almost cruel exception to prove the rule. In 1981, a mediocre 5-11 Ottawa team backed into the Grey Cup as the East’s second-place finisher and somehow found itself up 20-0 on a heavily favoured, three-time defending champion Edmonton squad. Edmonton stormed back and won it 26-23 on a late field goal, denying the worst team ever to reach a Grey Cup final at the time. It was as close as Ottawa would come to a miracle for the next 35 years.

The rest of the decade delivered exactly what you’d expect from a team haemorrhaging money and talent in equal measure. A 13-game losing streak swallowed most of the 1987 season on the way to a 4-14 finish. Then came 1988, a year the club’s marketing department, with almost unbelievable irony, branded “Super Season ’88” because Ottawa was hosting that year’s Grey Cup. The Riders finished 2-16, one of the worst seasons in CFL history by any measure: they were outscored by 142 points, gave up 82 sacks, and churned through starting quarterback Art Schlichter (banned in the NFL over a gambling scandal) before he was released mid-season. A 3-15 campaign in 1995 was arguably just as bad, with a defence that allowed nearly 39 points a game. Both the 1988 and 1995 Rough Riders would later be named among the 20 worst teams in CFL history by 3DownNation, and that’s from a league whose modern era stretches back to 1954.

By the time the Rough Riders actually folded in 1996, the ending had been telegraphed for a decade and a half. Owner Allan Waters lost $13 million on the team before handing it, for one dollar, to a group of under-capitalized limited partners in 1987. A parade of absentee owners followed, ending with Chicago investor Horn Chen, a man so disengaged from the franchise he reportedly never attended a single game in the two years he owned it, and so reclusive that the Ottawa Sun claims to have hired a private detective just to confirm he actually existed. After 120 years, the Rough Riders were gone. The best of times had curdled into the worst, and it took less than two decades to do it.

The Renegades: Four Years, Zero Playoff Appearances

Ottawa went five years without a CFL team before the Renegades launched in 2002. They never got off the ground. Over four seasons the Renegades finished 4-14, 7-11, 5-13, and 7-11, a combined 23-49 record with no playoff appearances in any of the four years.

Ownership instability struck again, and in almost farcical fashion: Bernie Glieberman, the same owner whose mismanagement had helped sink the Rough Riders years earlier, took over in 2005 and the team was losing millions annually by the time he pulled the plug in March 2006. The CFL dispersed the roster and Ottawa went dark again, this time for eight years, the second time in a decade the league had to clean up after a Glieberman-owned Ottawa football team.

The Worst of Times, Take Two: By the Numbers: Ottawa's Place in CFL Infamy

Strip away the sentiment and the record book is blunt. At Touchdown Towers our own history of the CFL’s longest losing streaks lists Ottawa twice among its worst runs: a 13-game skid by the 1987 Rough Riders, and, going back further, a 25-game losing streak by the Ottawa Senators/Rough Riders spanning 1928 to 1933, still one of the longest losing streaks in the sport’s history, professional or otherwise.And when 3DownNation set out to rank the 20 worst teams the CFL has ever produced, spanning more than 70 years of football across the whole country, Ottawa placed four times: the 1988 and 1995 Rough Riders, and the 2014 and 2019 REDBLACKS. No other city’s football history shows up that often on a single list of futility.

The REDBLACKS: The Best of Times, Then the Worst

When the REDBLACKS arrived in 2014, there was reason to think the pattern might finally break. Backed by local ownership group OSEG rather than an absentee investor, the franchise built something real, fast, even if the debut season was rough enough to land on that worst-ever list above. Franchise expansion teams should get a pass for that though.  After a 2-16 first year, Ottawa went on an extraordinary four-year run: an East Division title and Grey Cup appearance in 2015, a Grey Cup championship in 2016 (ending a 40-year title drought for the city), and another Grey Cup appearance in 2018. Three trips to the championship game in a four-year span, with one parade to show for it. For those four years, Ottawa football looked like it had finally shaken its own history.

Since then, the wheels have come off almost as thoroughly as they did for the two franchises that came before, and the 2019 collapse, three wins removed from a Grey Cup trip, was bad enough to earn its own spot among the worst teams in league history. Look at the full REDBLACKS record book, which reads less like a steady arc than a heart monitor:

Season

Record

Result

2014

2-16

Missed playoffs

2015

12-6

Grey Cup runner-up

2016

8-9-1

Grey Cup champions

2017

8-9

Lost East Semi-Final

2018

11-7

Grey Cup runner-up

2019

3-15

Missed playoffs

2020

N/A

Season cancelled (COVID-19)

2021

3-11

Missed playoffs

2022

4-14

Missed playoffs

2023

4-14

Missed playoffs

2024

9-8-1

Lost East Semi-Final

2025

4-14

Missed playoffs

2026

0-5 (so far)

N/A

Of the eleven completed REDBLACKS seasons, seven have been losing seasons. Add in an 0-5 start to 2026, and the franchise has now posted a losing record in eight of its last nine seasons, with the lone bright spot, 2024’s 9-8-1 mark, ending in a first-round playoff blowout loss to Toronto. Stack that against the Rough Riders’ death spiral and the Renegades’ four winless-in-spirit seasons, and a pattern starts to look less like bad luck and more like a habit: Ottawa football finds a formula that works, rides it for a few years, and then can’t get out of its own way.

This Season: A Quarterback Change Nobody Can Explain Yet

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The 2026 REDBLACKS are threatening to be the worst chapter yet. At 0-5 heading into their Week 7 bye, they’re winless through five games, and the losses haven’t been competitive so much as they’ve been slow-motion collapses, most recently a 40-17 defeat in Edmonton in which Ottawa trailed by just two points after three quarters before surrendering 24 fourth-quarter points. Quarterback Jake Maier has struggled through the interception-plagued stretch, and both Maier and head coach/GM Ryan Dinwiddie have publicly admitted, in almost identical language, that they don’t have a clear answer for how to fix it.

That admission has renewed scrutiny of the offseason decision that got Ottawa here. Dinwiddie named Maier the starter in training camp over incumbent Dru Brown, reportedly after a single strong preseason showing, and when Brown asked out of a backup role, the team traded him to Winnipeg and brought in veteran McLeod Bethel-Thompson as insurance. The numbers since haven’t been kind to that call: Brown holds a notably better career passer rating, winning percentage, and yards-per-attempt than Maier, and Maier’s yards-per-attempt so far in 2026 is the lowest mark of any starter in the league. Dinwiddie has defended the move as a philosophical one, wanting a quarterback who could push the ball downfield, and has pointed to Brown becoming something of a locker-room distraction once the decision was made. Whether that reasoning holds up may become clearer on July the 19th , when Brown returns to Ottawa wearing Blue and Gold and potentially starting for the injured Zach Collaros.

Curse, or Something More Ordinary?

“Cursed” is a satisfying word for a fanbase living through this, but the more mundane explanation running through all three eras is a familiar one in professional sports: unstable or inexperienced management, chronic quarterback uncertainty, and organizations that couldn’t sustain a short window of success into anything durable. The Rough Riders had absentee owners. The Renegades had chronic financial mismanagement. The REDBLACKS, for all their local ownership stability, have had four different starting quarterbacks anointed and discarded since their 2018 peak, and are now on their fifth. If you read these columns at all you know we think they had the man in harness and let him go.

Right now, there’s no getting around it: this is the worst of times. Zero and five, a quarterback who says he doesn’t have the answers, a coach who admits the same, and a century-and-a-half of history suggesting this kind of freefall is not new for this city. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, and I am not trying to.

But Dickens didn’t write only one half of that sentence, and neither should Ottawa’s story. The Rough Riders’ bleakest decade gave way, eventually, to the wild near-miss of 1981. The Renegades’ total collapse gave way, eight years later, to the REDBLACKS. And the REDBLACKS’ own 2-16 birth gave way, one year later, to a Grey Cup final appearance, followed by an actual championship the year after that. If there’s a genuine throughline in 150 years of Ottawa football, it isn’t just misery; it’s that misery here has never been permanent. The best of times keeps finding its way back, usually right when it looks least likely. Whether it arrives again this season, or the one after, or the one after that, the history suggests it isn’t a question of if. Just when.

Good luck for the resto of this season though Ottawa fans!

CHRIS LAWTON

CFL ANALYST

Chris originally started following the NFL with the ‘first wave’ of fans when it was shown on Channel 4 in the 1980’s. He has been a keen supporter of the Miami Dolphins since 1983. Chris first encountered the CFL in 2016 and instantly fell in love with the Canadian game. He has been writing about the CFL 2017. Chris has a degree in history, postgraduate degree in librarianship and can be found on twitter as @CFLfanUK

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