Tuesday Morning QB (CFL Week 16)
The first playoff spot is officially taken as the Calgary Stampeders are headed back to the playoffs for another run at the Grey Cup.
As the playoff spots begin to get less and less more teams will figure out that their hopes of a Grey cup will be gone.
For one team that is a bit of a shock as they went from being the best team in the league to one of the worst.
The Toronto Argonauts were standing on top of the CFL last November as they took home the Grey Cup against plenty of odds.
They were a team on the downtrend heading into Labour Day and a loss to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats seemed to make their Grey Cup hopes less likely.
Then they turned things around and began a massive run up the standings and into the Grey Cup.
There they faced the best team in the CFL, Calgary who had gone through an entire season as the clear favourites.
The Stamps were supposed to walk through the Argos in a mismatch of a team that entered the playoffs with a 9-9 record and one who finished the year with a 13-4-1 record.
The Argos were able to get through the powerhouse that was the Stampeders and took home the Grey Cup title.
It was a great introduction for a new group leading the teams as Marc Trestman and Jim Popp had just taken over the team that offseason.
The future was bright for a team seemingly just at the beginning of what could have been a great run for one of the oldest franchises in the league.
Then came the 2018 season as the Argonauts made a number of changes looking to take another run but that run never got off the ground.
They didn’t look like the team that played the Stampeders in the Grey Cup and they stumbled out of the gate.
There was still that hope as they had been able to turn things around a year ago and might be able to do it again.
After Week 16 their chances of making the playoffs have been shrunk to minimal proportions.
They have a chance but they haven’t been able to find that same magic that they did last year and it doesn’t seem like they have what it takes.
The Argonauts have had the worst fall of the season as they have gone from the #1 team to one of the worst.
They are now relegated to trying to stay out of the bottom of the league and will have to fight with the Montreal Alouettes to do just that.
It has been a strange year but for this season the Argonauts have fallen into the quickest way to sink a team in the CFL.
It can never really be reflected just how important the quarterback position is in the CFL as it is the one position that can completely change a team.
In the CFL there is no Grey Cup champion who hasn’t had a great quarterback no matter how good the rest of their team was.
The Argonauts went into the new season with a veteran and future hall of famer likely in his last season.
Ricky Ray had his best season in 2017 and he decided to return to build on that in 2018 but the questions rose about what he could do this time around.
When the season started he did alright but eventually, he took an awkward hit and went out for the rest of the season.
The Argos thought they had found his replacement in the offseason in James Franklin but when Franklin came in he was not the QB they needed.
They then went to McLeod Bethel Thompson who led them to an exciting win in his first start but hasn’t been able to do much else.
The Argonauts are without a real starting quarterback despite their planning and like any other team without a quarterback, they have sunk to the bottom of the league.
It is a struggle that Montreal has been dealing with for years and for the Argonauts it could be the beginning of a bad era without a QB.
This season has been a bit of a lost one as the Argonauts went from the best team to one of the worst and it all has to do with the play of the quarterback.
It has been a bad season for the champions but it is a warning to so many teams out there that there is a real need for a quarterback and a backup plan.
Fourth Down
Path Getting Tougher
The Toronto Argonauts are technically still in the hunt for the playoffs but they will need to make a serious run in these last five weeks. That is going to be tougher as the Argos lost one of their best players with James Wilder Jr. who was injured in Week 16. Wilder won’t return for the rest of the year leaving the Argos without the driving force behind their offence that has helped them to so many close games. With him, it wasn’t likely that they were going to make it but without him, the chances seem even less.
Halftime Show
The CFL announced that the halftime show for this year’s Grey Cup will be Grammy Award-winning Canadian Alessia Cara. The league continues to move towards Canadian artists after years of finding someone that was willing to play halftime of the biggest game regardless of where they were from. Now they are heading back to featuring Canadians in one of the biggest events of the Canadian sports calendar.
The Sport Addiction 