Why do people say the season doesn't really start until Labour day?

American fan here.

Because that’s mid-season. When teams start competing for playoff spots. That’s when the competitive juices start flowing at a greater rate.

Stupidest thing I have heard in sports is this CFL fan mantra that the season doesn’t start until Labour Day.
Points earned in the first half of the season count for the same amount as points earned in the second half of the season.
If a team chooses to truly compete only after game 9, they should not charge admission to their first 9 (exhibition) games. :stuck_out_tongue:

It goes back to the CBC days, when no games were televised until Labour Day

life is good without the CBC, but they did have better guys in the booth in them days.

The season starts week 1

yur pullin my leg :slight_smile:

Clearly its because thats when people in Germany and Mexico start to watch games.

I hope them days wasn’t Mark Lee and Walby.

Yikes.

Labour Day is the point in the season where you see who’s on the upward swing and who’s going the other way. Look at 2017 with the Argos. They were a mediocre team until they got on a roll after Labour Day and ended up winning the Grey Cup. Countless stories like that where a team gets hot in the last half of the season and wins the championship.

It’s actually just jargon. But Labour Day is when the stretch drive for the playoffs kicks off with three traditional Labour Day classics between teams whose rivalry goes back many, many decades.

:slight_smile:

What year did CFL games start being televised before Labour Day?

???

There’s also the fact that team bolster themselves with NFL cuts right around Labour Day. Yes, points that are earned during the summer are worth just as much, but teams can go a fantastic run after the airlifts as a previous poster mentioned.

Also… with CFL training camp being only 2 weeks long, teams aren’t usually firing on all cylinders until a few weeks into the season. And by labour day they’re all pretty much as good as they can be.

The point is that the quality of football goes up a notch by labour day.

Could not agree more!

Imagine a team missing the playoffs by a point or two, thinking “had we competed a little harder in the first half maybe we would be in the playoffs?

Season is 18 games.

I think they always were. CBC just starting only doing Labour Day onward in the 90’s. Great way to promote your product NOT!

Labour Day was always the time around which NFL teams started cutting players … influxes of American “upgrades” turned many a season a round over the years … this is not so much the case anymore as veteran contracts become guaranteed over the next few games and it is more difficult to remake a roster than it once was.

That and I think fans got more interested after summer vacations were over. Also the season used to be much shorter with fewer games played before Labour Day. So it seemed they were just hitting their stride around that time in the season.

While I won’t swear when I watched what back in the 1960’s, I absolutely can remember watching CFL football on TV prior to Labour Day in the 1970’s. It is possible though that those pre-Labour Day games were on CTV.

:-\

Very good point! The season didn’t even start until mid-July back in the 1960’s.