Crossing Over …

The 2025 NFL season is out of its infancy and is now undergoing puberty and its teenage years.  Meanwhile, up in Canada, the CFL regular season is drawing to a close.  CFL teams play 18 games in a season; as of today, teams there have played either 15 or 16 games already.  There are an odd number of teams in the CFL so there is a team on a BYE Week in every week of the season and teams get 3 BYE Weeks apiece in the CFL.

I think the CFL has an excellent structural element in its playoff selection process.  Six teams are going to make the playoffs and ideally that would be three teams from the East and three teams from the West based on regular season records and established tiebreakers.  However, the CFL puts a twist in the selection process that makes a ton of sense.  It is called the “Crossover”.  It is simple and it makes sense:

  • If the fourth-place team in either the East or the West Division has a better regular season record than the third-place team in the other division, then that fourth-place team “crosses over” and becomes a playoff participant in the other division’s bracket.

If the CFL regular season were over as of last weekend, there would be a “Crossover team”.

  • The third-place team in the East as of this morning is the Toronto Argonauts with a 5-11-0 record.
  • The fourth-place team in the East as of this morning is the Ottawa Redblacks with a 4-11-0 record.
  • In the West both the Calgary Stampeders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have an 8-7-0 record.
  • If the season were over today, tie breakers would put either Calgary or Winnipeg in third place in the West – – and the West Division playoffs – – , and the fourth-place team would “cross over” and take a spot in the East Division playoff bracket.
  • How sensible is that …!

To save you from the trouble of web searching, four CFL teams have guaranteed themselves a playoff slot, but no team has clinched the Division championship which is important in the CFL playoff structure because the Division Champs each get a bye in the six-team bracket.  Here are the two Division races as of this morning; these teams will be in the playoffs somewhere:

  • In the East:
      • Hamilton                      10-6-0
      • Montreal                      8-7-0
  • In the West:
      • Saskatchewan:           11-4-0
      • BC:                              9-7-0

No “Crossover Team” has ever made it to the Grey Cup Game.  I believe the last time there was a Crossover Team that won a playoff game and made it to the Division Final game was in 2009 when the BC Lions crossed over to the East, won its first-round playoff game and then lost in the East Finals to Montreal.  The ”Crossover Rule” does not happen every year and it has never produced a CFL Champion, but the rule provides for competitive balance and makes more late season games relevant than if it did not exist.

Moving on … Since I was looking at Canadian Football above, let me turn my attention to another league outside the US – – the English Premier League.  Their season is still young with plenty of time for dramatic changes, but a few things look as if they need to be followed.  As usual, I focus on the bottom of the league table at this point in the season to look at the possible races to avoid relegation.  The three teams in the relegation zone today all look pretty weak:

  • Burnley            1 win    1 draw             5 losses
  • West Ham       1 win    1 draw             5 losses
  • Wolves            0 wins  2 draws           5 losses

Three teams were promoted from the Championship to the EPL this year.  One of those teams is Burnley and you can see from above that Burnley is not doing well so far at the EPL level.  However, the other two recently promoted teams seem to be competitive:

  1. Sunderland      3 wins  2 draws           2 losses            Ninth place (out of 20)
  2. Leeds United   2 wins  2 draws           3 losses            Fifteenth place

Finally, I said above that the CFL Crossover rule was a good idea.  Not all “crossover ideas” make sense however as Chirstopher Lloyd points out here:

“On ‘Frasier,’ a network executive once suggested that one week we have John Lithgow play Frasier and Kelsey Grammar play Lithgow’s role on ‘3rd Rock from the Sun;’ I’ve been deeply afraid of the idea of a crossover ever since.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………

 

 

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