CFL Excitement Rankings, Week 1

Websites and other news organizations often compile statistics to determine how good a team is and call them 'Power Rankings'. These rankings are completely meaningless since the only true indicator of how good a team is is by its win-loss record, which is the same way that the league determines it.

These rankings are not totally useless, however, since they've given the 'Eh' Factor an idea into compiling statistics to determine how exciting the team is played. While close defensive battles may be a signature of the game of football, we all know that high-octane passing attacks put butts in the seats and close games keep you tuned in on the couch.

Call these what you will. 'Excitement Rankings' suffice for us.



The first week provided us with one absolute classic and three blowouts. Since only one game has been played for each team, opponents from the first week are bunched together, and these rankings should even themselves out in a few weeks.

1: Montreal Alouettes

Anthony Calvillo proved he still has it, throwing for 368 yards. Receiver SJ Green gave us our highlight of the year with his overtime catch. While they gave up a 21-point lead, they took part in a game that drew more viewers as it went on and even drew interest down South. The Als end up with the top spot thanks to a missed field goal return by Tim Maypray.

2: Saskatchewan Roughriders

Darian Durant threw for 478 yards in the double overtime win over the Montreal Alouettes. He led his team back from a 21-point deficit in the third quarter and threw two touchdown passes in the extra frame.

3: Calgary Stampeders

The second Canada Day game provided a nice comedown from the excitement of the first one, but wasn't as close and the outcome was never really in doubt. Henry Burris found six receivers more than once and led a clinical passing attack.

4: Hamilton Tiger Cats

Despite the big loss to the Blue Bombers and a brutal passing game (somebody find this team a quarterback, for the love of God) the Tiger Cats are in the top half of the rankings thanks to two returns by Marcus Thigpen, one off of a 119-yard missed field goal that also saw action down South.

(No more ESPN Top Plays in this post. We know our inferiority complex is showing.)

5: Winnipeg Blue Bombers

Buck Pierce may prove to be the best acquisition this year on any team. As a Lions fan, watching him throw for a couple of TDs while Casey Printers keeps under throwing his check down receiver makes me question Wally Buono's sanity.

6: Toronto Argonauts

Cleo Lemon had a disastrous debut, as expected, throwing for under 200 yards and throwing an interception. This is just a bad football team with a bad offense.

7: Edmonton Eskimos

Speaking of bad football teams, I truly hope that none of you were caught watching the Edmonton/BC game yesterday. While the rain on the new field turf at Commonwealth had people falling all over the place, Ricky Ray couldn't establish an offense and they were the lowest scoring team in week number one.

8: BC Lions

And coming in last place is BC. They were the only team to win their first road game and did it in completely disappointing fashion, with Paul McCallum having to kick six field goals. Casey Printers didn't throw a touchdown and his only highlight running was bumping into a table during the second quarter.

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Based on this, Saturday afternoon's Calgary/Hamilton game is supposedly our game of the week. That's probably proof our ranking system needs a few more games to become relevant, since this is likely to be a blowout, if Winnipeg lighting up that defense for 49 points is any indication.

Stay away from the Argos/Bombers game, which is the Friday Night affair. Glen Suitor being part of the broadcast team may make that a little easier.

Required reading: Burke Keeps His Promise

This is a piece from Bruce Arthur of the National Post. It's about Brian Burke's promise to his late gay son Brendan to march in the Toronto Pride Parade with him. It's meant to tug at your heartstrings.

[Burke Keeps His Promise - National Post]

This week is going to be pretty good. TSN and the Globe have been pumping up a series that focuses on why there aren't more Canadian NHL teams. And it'll be a good week here on the 'Eh' Factor too. On Monday we're going to debut our 'Excitement' rankings for CFL teams. We'll be following Joey Votto's All-Star Game push. On Thursday we'll rank how the Canadian teams did in the first week of free agency, and a bit of hoserism as we look at the outrageous free-agency demands of a prima donna Russian.

Joey Votto snubbed from all-star game, gets tossed

Only Albert Pujols had hit more home runs than Joey Votto prior to Sunday's games, yet Phillies manager Charlie Manuel felt it necessary to leave the CANADIAN off the National League All-Star roster.

Sure, All-Star games themselves are meaningless, but as a friend pointed out to me earlier, appearances matter so much when it comes time to negotiate salaries or possible Hall of Fame inductions (okay, that's a bit of a stretch for Votto) down the road.

Votto also leads the National League in OPS, is second in on-base percentage. Hell, his numbers are pretty damn comparable to the starter Pujols but nobody is really disputing that Votto should have been the starter. Why Adrian Gonzalez and Ryan Howard were seen as better first basemen than Votto is bad enough, but then Manuel added insult to injury by taking Omar Infante.

Luckily, he can still make the roster via a fan vote. He's up against Heath Bell, Carlos Gonzalez, Billy Wagner and Ryan Zimmerman.

So what did Votto do after hearing the news?

Joey Votto was ejected in the first inning today here at Wrigley, for arguing a called third strike.

Votto protested, slammed his helmet to the ground and was ejected by plate umpire Angel Campos. Manager Dusty Baker rushed out of the dugout and said a few words himself, but Baker was not tossed.

[Reds Win 14-3; Votto ejected]

The strike call itself was iffy, definitely low and probably a bit outside as well, although MLB gameday listed it as a strike.

All in all, Votto has seen better days, although Cincy still managed to beat the Cubs 14-3. Hell, maybe he just wanted to take the day off.

Only one Canadian was sent to Disneyland, that being Justin Morneau (duh). Three Jays are on the roster: John Buck, Jose Bautista and Vernon Wells.

Citizen footage of yesterday's Toronto FC/Houston Dynamo "brawl"

Somehow, the football purists would say that this ruins the game more than disastrous officiating at the World Cup, but we're probably good because none of them watch MLS anyway.

The Full 90 has a brief recap of the implications for Toronto's Julian de Guzman, who was in the middle of all the calamity.

That was in the 60th minute, where Nana Attakora and de Guzman got into it with Joseph Ngwenya of Houston, with the latter two getting instant red cards.

More detailed highlights of the "brawl" can be found at MLSNET.com's Matchcenter.

At the end of the game, Amadou Sanyang got into it with a couple of Houston players, earning himself his second yellow. Suspensions are sure to come.

By the way, the game ended in a 1-1 draw, with Brian Ching and Dan Gargan exchanging goals off of headers. Gargan's was FC's first at home since Chad Barrett scored against New England on May 22nd.

So, to recap, a couple of fights and Toronto FC's first goal at home in over a month. I thought the Maple Leafs had the summer off.

Great catch, bad math and worse tans highlight Grey Cup rematch

Montreal and Saskatchewan got the CFL season started last night with a ridiculous Grey Cup rematch. After Montreal took a 24-10 halftime lead, the game looked out of reach, and it seemed like a good time to get drunk with buddies and watch fireworks.

But out of nowhere, Saskatchewan came back, thanks to Saskatchewan's passing attack coming alive. Darian Durant finished 30-for-44 with 478 yards passing and the Riders tied the game, eventually winning 54-51 in overtime.

After the team's exchanged touchdowns at the end of the fourth, the CFL's new overtime rules came into play. Apparently all your post-touchdown conversions have to be from scrimmage for two points, which is a good rule, because it pretty well provided us with our highlight of the year.

TSN highlights

(First.... ahaha, this is hilarious. At 2:44 of that clip, the Roughriders get a stop on third down, effectively winning the game. Except they had 13 guys on the field. You'd think after all offseason they'd have learned to count.)

At 3:26, SJ Green makes what ended up being the #1 highlight of the night on ESPN (albeit in a losing cause). Happy Canada Day.

So we started off the year with a wild shootout and everybody wearing green goes home happy for a change, but isn't this 13th man thing a little crazy? The mistake cost the team a championship last year, so naturally you'd figure that they wouldn't do it again?

Prove me wrong, Weston Dressler:

"We laughed, we laughed on the sidelines."

I stand corrected. Andy Fantuz was a little more negative about the thing:

"A one in a thousand chance of that happening two games in a row is crazy. This time I won't dwell on it too much because we got the result. Hopefully we can clean up those logistics and not let it happen again."

It can't really be that hard to count to twelve. Naturally, we'll get a little more reaction out of Saskatchewan on this tomorrow, but, geez. Just because you only have ten fingers (well, the lucky Saskatchawaners anyway) doesn't mean it ain't easy to count to twelve. Use your toes if you have to. Or just take a guy off the field at the start of the game.

-In the other game, Calgary and Toronto combined for six fumbles and two interceptions and wasn't really as well played or entertaining. Jermaine Copeland, now an Argonaut, looked lost without Henry Burris. Cleo Lemon, the newest Argonauts quarterback, looked lost in general.

-Meanwhile, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats become the newest team to arbitrarily 'fine' players for disrespecting locker-room logos. It will cost you 25 push-ups if you walk on the Tiger logo in the middle of the floor. Because that's what's keeping you out of first place.

This has become quite commonplace, with fines in the NHL ranging from $10 to $25. I guess the Ti-Cats recognize no CFL player can afford that kind of money.

But seriously, how many pushups are the Alouettes going to have to do this year, when they inevitably walk all over the Tiger-Cats this season?

Darryl Sutter goes insane

I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to break down Free Agent signings on Canada Day. I didn't want to laugh at Bryan Murray's inexplicable decision to sign Sergei Gonchar over Anton Volchenkov, or Brian Burke's infatuation with Colby Armstrong's truculence.

But geez, Darryl Sutter, are you serious?

Sometimes an NHL GM might look to bring back veterans who had good young careers with that team. Lou Lamoriello brought back John MacLean to coach and traded for Jason Arnott. That's fine. Ken Holland had a couple of years where he had Chris Osgood starting back with Detroit, and that was fine as well, because Detroit won a Cup with him.

But today's moves by the Calgary Flames border on insane. Do the reminders of the years with Alex Tanguay and Olli Jokinen conjure up positive thoughts in the mind of Sutter? Sutter's a guy who ran his team into the ground against the salary cap last year by signing Jay Bouwmeester. Now he's found two former players who couldn't be more abject failures as Calgary Flames had they come out of the dressing room each game with their skates on the wrong foot.

What am I missing here? Is Roman Turek in as Mikka Kiprusoff's newest backup goalie? Is Al McInnis coming out of retirement? Was it bad enough that they brought Theo Fleury and Craig Conroy for nostalgia? Are the Eagles still touring?

The Tanguay signing is confirmed. Olli Jokinen is just a crazy Internet rumour right now. That guy may go down in history as one of the biggest failures in Calgary. He scored just 19 goals in 75 games with Calgary. They gave up a first round pick for him, and promptly gave up on the guy for Ales Kotalik and Christopher Higgins. Higgins is currently a free agent who scored two goals in 12 games in his brief stint in Cowtown. Kotalik had three goals in 26 games.

Remember when Darryl Sutter stepped down as the Flames coach so he could concentrate on managing? Harley Hotchkiss should have kept him as far away from the phones as possible. This is the guy who has drunk-dialed his way through the last two July 1sts and trade deadlines.

Sutter has always been a bit nuts, and if this Jokinen rumour is true (hell, even if it isn't) it's time for the Flames to take him out behind the barn Old Yeller-style.

Happy Canada Day!

What would a Canadian sports blog be without some dainty hoserism?

Canada Day is great. It's the opening day of NHL Free Agency, which means it's only about a week or so until Ilya Kovalchuk or Dan Hamhuis sign anywhere. It's also the return of football season, and the day for the Toronto Blue Jays to wear silly looking hats.

But it's Canada Day, which allows us to reflect upon how great this country is, particularly since it was on this day a mere 143 years ago that the British gave our elected government permission to ask the British permission to change our constitution! It doesn't get more Canadian than that. Canada Day allows us to celebrate that we don't have a national holiday marking the end of the second World War, or the invention of the nanaimo bar, but we have one celebrating a point in history where we just asked nicely.

So we have to celebrate. Celebrate the non-import rule in the CFL. Celebrate our favourite Canadian Major League Baseball stars (Victoria's Michael Saunders with TWO home runs against the Yankees last night! Take that, Battle of the Thames re-enacters!) Most importantly, celebrate players signing with Toronto who sound like STDs.

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Due to the total incompetence and dickheadedness of our Internet overlords at godaddy.com, we have lost our domain name and are back to being hosted by Blogspot.

And Happy Dominion Day. CFL recaps later, including whining about Glen Suitor.