It is our turn

Jeff Krever? @jeffkrever 15m15 minutes ago
Great stat from Steve Daniel: The last 7 years have produced 7 different Grey Cup Champions dating back to 2010. That's parity. #CFL

Paulo Senra? @paulosenra 9m9 minutes ago
Paulo Senra Retweeted Jeff Krever
Hamilton and Winnipeg remaining two teams to be crowned champs if we're going to make it 9 different teams in 9 years. #CFL

No dynasties over the last seven years.

It COULD be our year.

At this stage, fans in every CFL city (except Regina) are saying the same thing.

The next several weeks will tell us for real who that could be.

I'm OK with that. For the good of the league, of course.

But man ... if someone had said back in 2010 that this was the start of a different team winning the Cup for each of the next 7 years ... how many of us would have guessed that Ottawa's turn would arrive before ours? They didn't even exist yet!

Thing is, the RB’s got a lot of help from the league when they started and this accelerated the process for them. It’s ridiculous when other teams have had to struggle. Ottawa should have had to work within the current structure like everyone else. They also had a weak division to spring from.

The RBs had Henry Burris and we didn't - oh wait...

Amended…

And at one point last season he was benched and criticized for his poor play…remember the rant on national TV and his shot at TSN…

That’s right…And they didn’t have their receiving corp on the injury list…Owens…Fantuz…Tasker…

It’s about business. The league wanted Ottawa to do well out of the gate because they wanted to avoid a 3rd franchise flop in Ottawa.

A few years back, Bob Young revealed that there had been talk at one point of doing a dispersal draft of the other teams to help restock the Ticats to lift them out of the gutter, a move which he opposed.

We never would have lived that one down - and it may not have even helped that much, given that dispersal drafts are populated by lower-tier players. We had plenty of those already.

Except that this is not fair to the fans of the other teams in the league. That’s about business too.

Tilting the rules so that the new team gets an advantage to artificially put them ahead of everyone else instead of having them earn their success like other teams in the league is ridiculous.

One of the reasons Ottawa failed in the past was poor ownership, that’s on the league, not the other franchises or the fans.

Assistance to the new team should not be at the expense of others.

And look at how many years it’s taken for Bob and his team to find success. Something that Ottawa did NOT have to do.

So much for credibility.

I’m not sure I would characterize it that way. No one was complaining when the rEDbLACKS stunk in 2014, and all the help they got from the league was already on the roster at that point.

Their big breakthrough came in 2015 when they added key players through free agency. Either they picked better players than the other teams, or told a more compelling story to convince those guys to come to a team which at that point had done nothing but lose. (Or my pet theory - they exceeded the salary cap.)

In addition, they took a chance on Burris when everyone else had given up on him. They knew Hank was only a short-term solution but they were OK with that, and it paid off for them. Then they convinced Harris to sign as a backup, even though his main priority seemed to escape the backup role in Toronto. That wasn’t a slam dunk either. (As for how they could afford both Harris and Burris last year - see my pet theory above.)

Lastly, they were damn lucky to squeak past a decimated Ticat squad in 2015. But you have to give them full credit for last year’s playoff run and GC win.

First year team, it was expected. As a Tiger cat fan, I would not be concerned for any other team’s fate. It would not be exclusive to Ottawa.

2015, let’s remember we lost Collaros down the stretch, and got screwed on a pick six during a critical game against this same RB team.

In fact for the last couple of seasons, the east division was suffering from missing quarterbacks, other injuries.

And for the salary cap violation, they were fined a measly 6 thousand dollars. And were found a second time in 2016.

And then the entitlement continued when Jason Mass went to Edmonton. They claimed, even though he went to a better job, that this should not be allowed.

Ottawa should earn their success like every other team in this league and have not.

Only Winnipeg has had a longer drought in recent Grey Cup victories than the Tiger-Cats and when you consider upto 2014 before Ottawa returned to the league we had only eight teams competing for the yearly cup that the Ti-Cats have not won since 1999?

No doubt the loyal Ti-Cat fans deserve a winner in Hamilton, now we just need the players and coaches to win games and the football gods to keep this team healthy because an unhealthy Tiger-Cat team can sink quickly as we've seen before.

The last time we won the Grey Cup in 1999 Danny Mac and Darren Flutie were playing together and we had a dominant team in the CFL, we have to get back to that dominant style of football again, win many, score often and fight our way to the cup!!

GO CATS GO!!!

The playoffs and Grey Cup for a CFL team are really just a 3, or even 2, game lose-and-you're-out tournament. The best team of the year doesn't always win, but the team with the best record over those 3 weeks always does. When the Cats last won the Cup, they were the 3rd best team, overall, during the season. In the 17 championship games since, the best team, of the season overall (or tied for best), has won 8 times, the second best (or tied for 2nd best) has won 4 times, the 3rd and 4th overall ranked best teams have won once each, and 5th placed overall teams, like Ottawa last year, have come on strong at the right time to win the Cup on 3 occasions. The 1970 Grey Cup Champion Alouettes, I recall, were 6th overall during that season. I don't like the "Get into the playoffs and anything can happen mentality," that our coaches and players have adopted, in recent seasons, but it is true. Anything can happen. It did last season. The RedBlacks won their 2-game tournament, against better teams, and deserved those big Rings.