CFL 'Quick Kicks' 2026: Week 13

By Chris Lawton

Welcome to week thirteen 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.

If last week was about records falling all over the shop, this week doubled down with a vengeance. Montreal’s seven-game win streak finally met its match, a first-time starter picked up his head coach’s hundredth career victory, a fumbled kick return handed Toronto’s opponents two points without a single offensive snap, and Ottawa achieved a piece of history so grim it required its own paragraph of context, which frankly has become something of a recurring feature of this column. Turnovers decided at least two of the four games outright, special teams settled a third, and by Sunday night there wasn’t a single team in the East Division able to point to a win this week. Get the kettle on, there’s a lot to get through.

The first game of the week saw the Winnipeg Blue Bombers do to Montreal what precisely nobody else had managed all season, taking the league-leading Alouettes apart 44-28 at Princess Auto Stadium on Friday night to end their run at seven straight wins. Montreal slip to 9-2, still very much in control of the East, but the manner of the defeat will have set alarm bells ringing in a way that a narrow loss wouldn’t have.

Winnipeg simply took the ball away from them. Zach Collaros was excellent, 26 of 32 for 324 yards and two touchdowns, both to Ontaria Wilson, who had managed just 102 yards combined across his previous three games and picked a rather good time to rediscover his form with nine catches for 114 yards. Brady Oliveira bulled his way to 106 yards and a score, and Bryce Perkins did the dirty work in short yardage, punching in two one-yard touchdowns of his own. The Bombers ran the ball on fifteen of their thirty-three first-half offensive plays and controlled the clock from start to finish, the sort of possession-football approach that tends to work rather well against a team as explosive as Montreal, since it simply keeps their offence off the field.

Special teams had their say too. Tanner Cadwallader blocked a Joseph Zema punt deep in Alouettes territory in the third quarter, setting up another Perkins plunge, and by the time Winnipeg were done there was very little doubt about who had won the turnover and field-position battles. Davis Alexander did his best to keep Montreal in it, tying his career high with four touchdown passes, and there was a genuinely lovely piece of history buried in the defeat: Tyler Snead and Tyson Philpot both went over 1,000 receiving yards on the season, the first time two Alouettes wideouts have hit the mark in the same year since S.J. Green and Jamel Richardson managed it back in 2012. Small mercies. Montreal’s run game, which came in averaging a league-best 118.8 yards a game, was throttled to almost nothing, with Travis Theis held to 31 yards on eight carries, his quietest afternoon since Week 4. Elsewhere, Bombers defensive lineman Willie Jefferson got a hand on a fourth-quarter Alexander pass for his hundredth career knockdown, becoming only the third player in league history to reach that mark, which is the sort of thing you only really appreciate once someone points out how few people have ever done it. The only players ahead of him are Adrion ‘Pee Wee’ Smith (105) & Eddie Davis (111).

Player of the Game: Ontaria Wilson, WR, Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Snapped a quiet three-week stretch in the most emphatic way possible. 9 catches, 114 yards, 2 receiving touchdowns.

The second game of the week took Josh Love into his first CFL start, filling in for the injured Vernon Adams Jr., and he came through it in style as the Calgary Stampeders edged the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 28-23 at McMahon Stadium on Saturday afternoon, courtesy of a 49-yard Dedrick Mills touchdown with 38 seconds left on the clock. It was also, rather neatly, the 100th CFL win of head coach Dave Dickenson’s career, which is a nice round number to land on against a divisional rival with your emergency quarterback playing the hero.

Calgary trailed 23-22 after the three-minute warning and had spent large stretches of the afternoon chasing the game, Hamilton having gone up early through a 51-yard Myron Mitchell touchdown off a Tre Ford deep ball. Love finished 25 of 36 for 274 yards, throwing his first career CFL touchdown to Ajou Ajou right before half-time to put the Stamps ahead at the break, and while an unfortunate third-quarter interception, a Love pass that cannoned off a teammate straight into the hands of Hamilton’s Charbel Dabire, briefly handed the lead back to the visitors, Calgary’s rookie starter kept his composure. On the winning drive he completed four passes, two of them for first downs, to set up Mills, who finished the day with 118 rushing yards on 14 carries and 141 yards from scrimmage in total. Rene Paredes, making his first appearance of the season, was leaned on early and often, kicking on Calgary’s first three possessions and converting five of six attempts overall. Ford was far from disgraced for Hamilton, throwing for 212 yards and two touchdowns and adding 80 yards on the ground in his second straight start, but the Ticats let slip a real chance at being the only winner this week in a congested East, while Calgary move to 5-6 and, for one afternoon at least, get to enjoy the taste of a game they really shouldn’t have won.

Player of the Game: Dedrick Mills, RB, Calgary Stampeders. The game-winning score capped a day of genuinely heavy lifting for the Stamps’ offence. 118 rushing yards, 1 touchdown, plus 23 yards receiving. 141 total yards from scrimmage.

The third game of the week was as fittingly bizarre as CFL football tends to get, the Saskatchewan Roughriders coming from behind for the entire evening to edge the Toronto Argonauts 28-24 at Mosaic Stadium on Saturday night, snapping their own two-game skid in the process. The Riders did not lead this game once until the three-minute warning of the fourth quarter, which, when you consider they won it, tells you rather a lot about how the final stretch went.

Toronto did most of the good work early. Chad Kelly opened the scoring with a touchdown to Tyler Kahmann on the game’s first drive, added a second Kahmann major before half-time off a string of twenty-plus-yard completions, and found fullback Jack Cassar for the first major of his career after a 58-yard bomb to Damonte Coxie had set it up. Alex Hale knocked in a career-long field goal as time expired in the half to make it 22-12 Toronto at the break, and things got stranger still shortly after when Marcus Sayles returned a two-point conversion attempt the other way for the Argos, the sort of defensive two-pointer that doesn’t come around often and is worth savouring purely for its rarity value. Trevor Harris and the Riders chipped away regardless. A James Burgess Jr. interception setting up an early Dhel Duncan-Busby score, and a Nelson Lokombo pick to close the third quarter setting up a KeeSean Johnson touchdown to open the fourth. The Riders picking off Kelly is no shocker as there isn’t a window he isn’t prepared to throw into no matter how well defended it is. A DeWayne Hendrix safety touch briefly nudged Toronto back in front by three, but Saskatchewan drove the length of the field on their next possession, Tommy Stevens punching in from two yards out at the 2:57 mark to give the Riders their first lead of the night, and the defence made sure it was also their last stand of the evening. Saskatchewan move to 7-4 and back into the thick of a congested West, while Toronto drop to 5-6 with a Labour Day date at Hamilton to come.

Player of the Game: Trevor Harris, QB, Saskatchewan Roughriders. Never flustered by trailing for the best part of three quarters, and found the two throws, to Duncan-Busby and Johnson, that kept his side in touching distance until the Riders’ running game could finish the job. 23 of 36 for 313 yards, 2 touchdowns. 1 carry for 7 yards.

The final game of the week saw the BC Lions extend their winning streak to five with a 45-24 win over the Ottawa REDBLACKS at TD Place on Sunday night, Zander Horvath bulldozing his way to four rushing touchdowns to push his league lead in total majors to sixteen for the season. BC move to 6-5, but this one will be remembered, fairly or not, for what it meant at the other end of the field.

Ottawa actually led 14-3 early, Alonzo Addae picking off Nathan Rourke twice in the first half and the home-side turning both into touchdowns, one a Jake Maier strike to former Lion Ayden Eberhardt, the other a Bryson Barnes plunge. Rourke, who took a nasty blow to the head in the second quarter and briefly left the game for Kaidon Salter before returning after the break, finished with 355 yards and two touchdowns to go with those two picks, his fourth straight game over 300 passing yards, while BC’s defence and, above all, Horvath simply ground the REDBLACKS down. The Lions running back piled up 164 yards on 24 carries and 30 more through the air, scoring in every quarter but the first, and Jevon Cottoy broke three tackles on his way to a fourth-quarter score to put the result beyond doubt.

The defeat drops Ottawa to 0-11, and here is where the paragraph of context comes back in, because Maier is now, officially, the first quarterback in CFL history to begin a season 0-11 as his team’s starter. Four other teams have opened a season at least that badly in the modern era, the 1981 Argonauts, the 2003 Tiger-Cats, the 1979 Roughriders and the 1994 Shreveport Pirates among them, but every single one of those clubs made at least one quarterback change along the way to get there. Ottawa have not. Three other quarterbacks have previously lost ten straight starts to open a year, George Herring with BC in 1958, Condredge Holloway with those same 1981 Argonauts, and a young Anthony Calvillo with Hamilton in 1997, and none of them were given an eleventh chance to make it worse. Maier now stands entirely alone on that particular list, for better or, considerably more likely, for worse.

Ottawa’s overall losing streak, dating back into last season, extends to seventeen games, still the longest in the modern era of the league and second only to the twenty-five in a row racked up by an entirely different Ottawa franchise, the Rough Riders, between 1928 and 1932. Some things, it seems, are simply written into the geography.

Player of the Game: Zander Horvath, RB, BC Lions. Four touchdowns and 194 total yards on a night when BC needed someone to simply wear a defence down, which he did with some enthusiasm. 164 rushing yards, 30 receiving yards, 4 rushing touchdowns.

Standings

Interdivisional Standings 2026 this week: East Division: 0 West Division 4

Interdivisional Standings 2026 this season: East Division: 9 West Division 18      

So that’s Week 13 filed away, and the picture across the league keeps sharpening by the week. Montreal’s seven-game streak is gone, but with a 9-2 record and a fixture list that still favours them, the East remains theirs to lose. In the West, BC’s five straight wins have them level with Winnipeg at 6-5, Saskatchewan have steadied the ship at 7-4, and Calgary’s late heroics keep them within touching distance at 5-6, which makes for about as tightly packed a division as you will find outside of a British motorway at rush hour. As for Ottawa, well, you know the story by now, and I rather suspect we will be revisiting it again before this column is done for the year.

Next week it’s time for the annual Labour Day Classic rivalry games. Three of them do not kick off before midnight UK time, but as ever you can catch up with them on CFL+ The best bet for UK based CFL fans is Toronto at Hamilton on Monday the 7th at 7:30 PM UK time.

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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