If you’ve watched football for any length of time, you’ve seen your fair share of shocking results — especially in the playoffs, where the one-and-done nature of the tournament almost guarantees something truly outrageous will occur.
We saw one of those happenings on Saturday when the 16-2 Toronto Argonauts got demolished in the East Final by the Montreal Alouettes by a score of 38-17.
The Argos were not just a juggernaut, they were the juggernaut, so much so that we all should have started calling them the Cain Markos. They tied the record for wins in the regular season, joining the 1989 Edmonton Football Team as just the second squad in CFL history to win 16 games. They clinched the division title with six games remaining in the regular season and looked as dominant as any team has in recent memory.
While last year’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the 2019 Hamilton Tiger-Cats both looked unstoppable for stretches to finish the season 15-3, this year’s Argos had a Thanos-level of inevitability about them. They lost their two games by a combined 23 points and Saturday’s defeat was the first this season in which Most Outstanding Player nominee Chad Kelly played the majority of snaps.
That is what made Saturday’s results so stunning. This season truly felt like we were just wasting our time, waiting for the inevitable Argos coronation to take place at Tim Hortons Field on November 19. The arguments were already being soft-peddled on social media that this year’s Argos were the greatest single-season team in league history and all that was needed to cement their status was the Grey Cup that would assuredly come.
The Alouettes brought a sudden end to all that talk with the beatdown they put on the Double Blue which now leads us to a much more entertaining question, one that seemed unfathomable less than a week ago: where does Toronto’s loss in the East Final rank as far as all-time CFL playoff upsets go?
The only proper way to answer that question is with a list, so here are my top five biggest playoff upsets in CFL history.
Honourable mentions: 1989 West Final, 1994 West Final, 2011 East Semi-Final
First, the honourable mentions, all of which deserve at least being touched upon.
The 1989 West Final saw the CFL’s only other 16-win team get smacked in the mouth, losing to the 9-9 Saskatchewan Roughriders who just got hot at the right time. This doesn’t make the list because the Riders had already shown that year they could hang with the Green and Gold, beating them 48-35 in Regina in September.
The Stampeders have a lot of great teams that were dealt shocking defeats, but not many can match the 15-3 team from 1994 that lost in stunning fashion to the B.C. Lions. With Doug Flutie and a host of all-stars, the Stamps watched Danny McManus come on in relief of an injured Kent Austin and drive the Lions the length of the field to throw the game-winning score to Darren Flutie as time expired.
While 2011 was a down year for the Montreal Alouettes, they were still the two-time defending Grey Cup champions and three-time defending East Division title holders when they lost 54-48 in overtime to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. The loss was Montreal’s first playoff defeat at home since 2004 and just the third the Als had lost in Montreal since returning to the league in 1996.
5. 2019 Grey Cup
Result: Winnipeg Blue Bombers 33, Hamilton Tiger-Cats 12
The last three seasons have taken some of the juice out of this upset but if you cast your mind back to November 2019, almost no one predicted the Blue Bombers, who were riding a 29-year Grey Cup drought, would beat (much less demolish) the Ticats. The Tabbies were a 15-3 bulldozer and beat the Bombers by 20 in late September. This was supposed to be Hamilton’s long-sought-after coronation and it turned into another nightmarish championship performance.
4. 1986 Grey Cup
Result: Hamilton Tiger-Cats 39, Edmonton Football Team 15
This is one the Ticats were not expected to win whatsoever. Despite making their third straight Grey Cup appearance, the 9-8-1 Tiger-Cats were significant underdogs to the 13-4-1 Edmonton Football Team. The Green and Gold won both meetings in the regular season, including a 30-3 shellacking in October. The Black and Gold used a smothering defence that forced eight turnovers and notched 10 sacks. The Tabbies were up 29-0 at halftime and it was a cakewalk from there.
3. 2023 East Final
Result: Montreal Alouettes 38, Toronto Argonauts 17
Perhaps recency bias puts this one higher than it should be but when a team lays this size of an egg after taking everyone to the woodshed for four months, it earns its spot on the list. The Argos felt like a freight train that was going to obliterate everything in its path until an unheralded lark of all things stopped it dead in its tracks. It wasn’t just that the Argos lost, but how they lost.
The Als forced nine turnovers and Chad Kelly played the worst game of his pro or college career. This didn’t even look like the same team we saw pile up points and suffocate opponents all year. It was a truly shocking outcome that almost no one could have predicted.
2. 2016 Grey Cup
Result: Ottawa Redblacks 39, Calgary Stampeders 36 (OT)
There is an argument to be made that the 2016 Calgary Stampeders are the greatest CFL team ever assembled, up there with the 1996-97 Argos and 1995 Baltimore Stallions. The Stamps truly owned the CFL in 2016, reeling off 14 straight wins and losing only one game that mattered in the regular season. They had nine league all-stars, the league’s top player in Bo Levi Mitchell, as well as the top Canadian, top offensive lineman, best rookie, and the coach of the year.
The Redblacks were an under-.500 team that won a horrible East Division. This wasn’t supposed to be close and not only did the Redblacks get out to an early two-score lead, they pulled off the Titanic upset after the Stampeders tied the game to send it to overtime.
1. 2001 Grey Cup
Result: Calgary Stampeders 27, Winnipeg Blue Bombers 19
This might be controversial, but the 2001 Blue Bombers were one of the most stacked teams the CFL had ever seen. They won 14 games, had seven league all-stars, and took home five of seven awards. They also had arguably the greatest receiver in league history in Milt Stegall and an incredible running mate for him in a young Arland Bruce III.
This Stamps team, led by the long-forgotten Marcus Crandall, is arguably the worst team to ever win a Grey Cup. They just got lucky to play in a truly pathetic West Division that year that saw Edmonton finish first with a 9-9 record. Long before the 2019 squad ended the drought, this was the Bombers side that should have. A truly shocking result saw them get behind early and never recover. There have been a lot of unfathomable losses in CFL history, but for this scribe, this one is easily the most baffling of them all.
