The Saskatchewan Roughriders and Calgary Stampeders will officially play their Week 6 game on Saturday after poor air quality at Mosaic Stadium rendered conditions unplayable on Friday night.
The CFL has already announced that kickoff of the game will take place at 4:00 p.m. EDT, though the decision appears to contradict the CFL’s publicly available weather protocol, which came into effect in 2019 in cooperation with the CFLPA.
Under the terms of that policy, any game delayed by more than three hours is supposed to be cancelled. Language explicitly states that “players will NOT be required to play on the following day.” However, the league believes that the policy only applies once players have warmed up.
“That’s really to protect the players once they’ve warmed up, once they’ve started playing, to prevent long delays, and obviously the issues it does for their bodies,” Riders’ team president Craig Reynolds explained in a press conference. “If you’ve not warmed up, which tonight we didn’t, and we didn’t start the activity, if you will, you can delay as long as you need to.”
Any game cancelled before the 7:30 mark of the third quarter that does not meet a predetermined point differential threshold is supposed to be decided via a two-possession shootout before the next scheduled game between those opponents. In this case, that would have been on Saturday, August 23, when the Riders are slated to visit the Stampeders at McMahon Stadium.
Because the previous game never kicked off and is therefore tied 0-0, neither team would be granted an advantage in terms of field position in this hypothetical scenario and each would get two possessions starting from the 55-yard line. As the visiting team, the Riders would have gotten the first possession, while the Stampeders could have chosen the direction of play.
Once the teams have rotated through the four total drives, the leading team would have been awarded the win and two points in the standings. If the result was a tie, the mini-game would have ended with each team receiving one point. Once the mini-game concluded, a regularly timed quarter break would occur, followed immediately by kickoff of that week’s game.
It is unclear if the CFLPA feels the same way as the league and its teams about Friday’s application of the policy, though Reynolds indicated they were involved in at least some of the preparatory meetings. Either way, CFL fans have missed out on a historic first-of-its-kind shootout in favour of a regular old football game, though most seem to be okay with that.
The Saskatchewan Roughriders (4-0) and Calgary Stampeders (3-1) have just over 15 hours to rest before they take to the field — just so long as the Air Quality Health Index stays below an eight. All tickets used on Friday will remain valid for Saturday. Out-of-town fans who are unable to attend will be refunded or otherwise compensated with new tickets.
The game will be broadcast on TSN and RDS in Canada and on CFL+ internationally. Radio listeners can tune-in on 770 CHQR in Calgary and 620 CKRM in Regina.
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