CFL 'Quick Kicks' 2026: Week 17

By Chris Lawton

Welcome to week seventeen of our weekly review of each week of the 2026 CFL season. ‘Quick Kicks’ brings you week-to-week news of how the games went, scores, surprises, and a general feel of ‘what we learned’ from the games.

Montreal were the only team to take a bye this week, which meant four games, and between them they served up a genuinely odd little cross-section of what this league does best: a team winning ugly while somehow still finding a way to win, a tie-breaker settled the hard way, a franchise ticking past a piece of history nobody wants, and a kicker having the sort of night that will be shown in highlight reels for decades. Special teams, as ever round these parts, had rather more to say about the outcome of these games than most neutrals would expect, and there’s a fair bit of history to unpack too. Kettle on, biscuits out, there’s a lot to get through.

The first game saw the Toronto Argonauts survive a proper scare in Winnipeg, edging the Blue Bombers 30-28 at Princess Auto Stadium in front of 32,343, and doing it in a way that has become something of a pattern for this Argos side: winning while the underlying numbers suggest they probably shouldn’t have. Dru Brown, filling in for the injured Zach Collaros, tore into Toronto’s defence early, throwing two touchdowns and adding a rushing score of his own to put Winnipeg up 21-7, and for the better part of twenty minutes this looked like the sort of home banker that gets filed away without much fuss. Then Chad Kelly happened. The Argos quarterback found Tyler Kahmann for a 56-yard touchdown to get back into it, then came out of the locker room at halftime and hit Damonte Coxie for an even more ridiculous 84-yard score off a broken play, Kelly buying time under pressure and delivering a throw across his body that had no right to land where it did. Kelly finished 22-of-31 for 290 yards and two touchdowns, but also threw two interceptions, the sort of boom-or-bust night that’s become entirely typical of him this year; he’s now passed 5,000 yards for the season and, with three games left, needs 933 more to reach 6,000, though he was having none of the milestone talk afterwards, saying simply that winning was all that mattered to him.

It was special teams, though, that arguably decided this one. Sergio Castillo’s streak of 26 straight made field goals ended in the first quarter when he missed from 45 yards, and Janarion Grant returned the miss a staggering 128 yards for a touchdown, the second-longest missed-field-goal return in CFL history and enough to move Grant into outright second place on the league’s all-time list for return touchdowns, one behind the legendary Henry “Gizmo” Williams. With the CFL’s field set to shrink next season and the uprights moving to the back of the end zone, that sort of eye-watering return may be an endangered species from here on, which makes it worth savouring while we can. Toronto’s special teams coordinator Mickey Donovan wasn’t done there either, dialling up a Grant-to-Dave Ungerer III lateral on a punt return during the winning drive that set up the decisive field goal. Add it all up and Toronto’s offence was outscored by Winnipeg’s for large chunks of the night, yet the Boatmen still walked out with the win, extending their streak to four and locking up no worse than second in the East.

Friday’s game also doubled as Winnipeg’s annual Orange Shirt Day fixture, part of the CFL’s build-up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, with both sides in orange warm-ups, drum performances pregame and a round dance at halftime; it’s become a fixture of late-September CFL weekends across the league, along with the special indigenized team logos that have gradually spread from BC’s original initiative to every corner of the league.

Player of the Game: Chad Kelly, QB, Toronto Argonauts. Two of the most improbable touchdown throws you’ll see all season, and yet another win manufactured from a game his team didn’t remotely dominate. 22-of-31, 290 yards, 2 touchdowns.

The second game took us out to BC Place, where the Lions did what they couldn’t quite manage last year, beating Saskatchewan 31-24 to claim the season series 2-1 and, with it, the all-important tie-breaker in what is an outrageously tight West Division scrap. Nathan Rourke was the story, and by some distance: 22-of-28 for 375 yards and four touchdowns, at one stage spinning out of what looked a certain sack before reversing field and finding Justin McInnis for a 59-yard dagger in the fourth quarter. It was the kind of has-all-the-answers performance that follows on from his big display against Montreal a few weeks back, and it leaves Rourke’s numbers against Saskatchewan at four wins from eight career attempts. Zander Horvath, held out of the end zone for a rare botched short-yardage snap, still remains on course to chase down Milt Stegall‘s single-season touchdown record, though he now needs five in the final four games to get there. BC’s defence, for its part, weathered a few long Saskatchewan drives but came up with the stops that mattered, stuffing Tommy Stevens back, when he normally wins the short yardage battles, late in the third quarter to snuff out the Riders’ best chance of a response.

That tiebreaker matters more than it might look on paper. BC move to 8-6 and, on the head-to-head split, now sit above a Saskatchewan side also at 8-6, giving the Lions full control of their own destiny in the race for a home playoff date, a remarkable turnaround for a team that started the season 1-5. It’s worth noting BC were also playing their annual Orange Shirt Day game, a tradition they were first to establish in the CFL and the CFL’s push to spotlight Indigenous communities and the Truth and Reconciliation movement each September has become a genuine fixture of the schedule.

Player of the Game: Nathan Rourke, QB, BC Lions. Four touchdowns, 375 yards, and the sort of complete command of a game that should worry every other team still standing in the West. 22-of-28 passing, 4 touchdowns, 3 carries for 37 yards.

The third game, and the one carrying the heaviest history, saw the Calgary Stampeders put 45 points on the Ottawa REDBLACKS at TD Place, winning 45-31 in a rematch of last week’s last-gasp thriller, this time with none of the late drama. Vernon Adams Jr. was excellent, completing 80 percent of his passes for 422 yards and three touchdowns, and Calgary racked up 520 yards at 9.5 a play without turning the ball over once, a fairly emphatic response from a team still clinging to its own play-off hopes. For Ottawa, the pattern was depressingly familiar: a promising start undone by a calamitous third quarter, an onside kick recovery wiped out by an offside flag, a dropped touchdown pass in the end zone, and an interception erased by a roughing-the-passer call that gifted Calgary a fresh set of downs. McLeod Bethel-Thompson threw for 418 yards and two touchdowns and Justin Hardy became the first Ottawa receiver since Brad Sinopoli and Greg Ellingson to reach 1,000 yards in four straight seasons, but none of it was close to enough against a defence that’s now given up 40-plus points in seven games this year.

The defeat drops Ottawa to 0-14, which ties them with the 1994 Shreveport Pirates for the worst start to a season in CFL history. There’s a neat, slightly grim symmetry here that’s worth dwelling on. Shreveport were owned by Bernard and Lonnie Glieberman, the very same family who’d previously owned the old Ottawa Rough Riders before that franchise folded, and who launched the ill-fated US-expansion Pirates the following year; Shreveport lost their first fourteen straight before finally beating the Sacramento Gold Miners in mid-October and finished 3-15, folding entirely after 1995. Now, three decades on, a different Ottawa franchise finds itself matching that exact number and doing it in a season that has already broken the record for the longest losing streak in modern CFL history outright, one that now stands at twenty games across two campaigns. The only team to have lost more in a row remains Ottawa’s own ancestors, the original Rough Riders, who dropped twenty-five straight between 1928 and 1932, before the CFL as we know it even existed. Ottawa have four games left to avoid becoming the first team in league history to finish an entire season without a win; the Glieberman connection, purely coincidental as it is, makes the whole thing read like something a novelist would reject as too neat. No wonder we at Touchdown Towers were asking earlier in the season if Ottawa football is cursed, and its only got worse since then!

Player of the Game: Vernon Adams Jr., QB, Calgary Stampeders. Three touchdowns and barely broke a sweat doing it, extending his record against Ottawa to 7-2 in the process. 422 passing yards, 3 touchdowns, 80 percent completion.

The fourth game, and by a distance the most remarkable individual performance the league has produced, saw the Edmonton Elks outlast the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 37-35 in overtime at Commonwealth Stadium, a result built almost entirely around the boot of Vincent Blanchard. The 28-year-old was asked to kick nine field goals across regulation and two overtime periods, and made every single one, including a 54-yarder, breaking the previous record of eight, which had been shared five ways since the 1980s. His 27-yarder with one second on the clock forced overtime in the first place, and he then kept Edmonton alive with further makes in each extra period before the game finally went to a two-point conversion shootout, only the second in CFL history, to settle it; Hamilton’s Harrison Frost failed to convert on the first attempt, and Cody Fajardo found Joshua Cephus on the next to end it.

For anyone raised on the NFL or college game, CFL overtime is worth explaining properly, because it bears no resemblance to either. Rather than a fresh possession from your own end, each team gets the ball at the opponent’s 35-yard line and simply tries to score, alternating ends; in the regular season, if it’s still level after both sides have had one attempt each, you go again, but any touchdown must be followed by a two-point convert rather than a routine single-point kick, no field goals for the extra point allowed. If it’s still tied after that second round, the game (in the regular season) it was always simply recorded as a tie. What happened in Edmonton on Saturday, going to a shootout of alternating two-point conversion attempts after those two full overtime periods finished level, is new enough that it’s only happened once before in league history, a quirk introduced to avoid an endless string of ties. It made for a bizarre, brilliant spectacle, and it will not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no denying it produced one of the most memorable finishes of the season.

The win takes Edmonton to 11-4, their best record through this stage of a season since 2017, and comes in the same week the CFL lost Norm Kimball, the architect of the old Eskimos’ five-Grey-Cups-in-a-row dynasty of the 1970s and 80s, who died at 96; there’s a nice, if bittersweet, sense of a franchise finding its feet again in a week that also marked the passing of the man most responsible for its glory years. For Hamilton, meanwhile, the defeat confirmed what had looked inevitable for weeks: the Ticats are officially out of the play-off picture, extending what is now a 27-year wait for a Grey Cup, the longest active drought in the league, a hard fall for a side that came into the year as many people’s pick to win the East.

Player of the Game: Vincent Blanchard, K, Edmonton Elks. Nine from nine on the night, a new CFL record, and 28 of his team’s 37 points either kicked or converted. 9 field goals (including a 54-yarder), 1 convert.

The State of Play

So that’s Week 17 filed away, and while the games themselves were spread fairly evenly across quality and drama, the theme running through all four of them was that special teams kept deciding things nobody expected them to decide: a missed field goal turned touchdown in Winnipeg, a tie-breaker sealed in Vancouver, and a kicker single-handedly keeping Edmonton in a game his offence hadn’t quite won on its own. Toronto remain the league’s great magic trick at the minute, winning without dominating in any conventional sense, and it’ll be worth watching whether that catches up with them before the play-offs arrive. BC’s charge up the West standings continues apace, and Saskatchewan now find themselves needing help from elsewhere to avoid a genuinely tricky road through the crossover.

Out east, Ottawa’s grim march through the record books rolls on; whether they can avoid finishing 0-18 remains the only real question left in a lost season, and it’s a horrible one for R-Nation to be asking with a month of football still to go. And Edmonton, while Hamilton’s collapse and Ottawa’s misery understandably grab the headlines, deserve a line of their own: a team that’s spent most of the last decade in the CFL wilderness now has its best season in the better part of a decade, built on the sort of complete performance, offence, defence and a record-breaking leg, that suggests this one isn’t a fluke.

Next week there are four fixtures again, and the pick for anyone in the UK is Toronto hosting BC on Saturday 3rd October, kicking off at a very reasonable 8 PM UK time, with Nathan Rourke’s Lions looking to end a miserable run at BMO Field that stretches back to 2019. Given how these two have played of late, don’t expect a quiet one.

Until next week, CFL friends!

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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