Ambrosie reveals CFL divisional playoff games moving to Saturdays in 2023

Changes are coming to the CFL playoffs.

“Thanks to our teams, starting in 2023, our playoff games — the Western and Eastern semifinals and the Western and Eastern finals — are going to be played on Saturdays,” CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie said during his Fan State of the League address Friday at the Queensbury Centre.

Those games typically have been played on Sundays, when they compete with NFL games for television viewers.

The Grey Cup likely will stay on a Sunday, Ambrosie said, but he admitted moving that game to Saturday also has been discussed.

“Grey Cup is a fascinating question and the idea that potentially having Grey Cup Saturday versus Grey Cup Sunday is something we talked about,” he said two days before the 2022 title game is to be played at Mosaic Stadium.

“But as you all know, the Grey Cup Festival is as much a part of Grey Cup as the game is itself, and one of the things we’re constantly battling with is the risk of truncating our Grey Cup Festival week by losing a day on the weekend. That’s something that we’re talking about and it’ll be an ongoing conversation.”

During his State of the League address to media earlier Friday, Ambrosie’s message was progress, not perfection.

Ambrosie said the league has seen some positives come from the partnership it announced last year with Genius Sports, such as increased web traffic and social media engagement. But he knows fans want to see more.

“You have to think about our relationship with Genius like a new (building) development. For the first few months, all you can see is heavy equipment and holes being dug in the ground,” Ambrosie said.

“That’s not the sexiest part of a new development but unless you build that foundation right and unless we get our technology foundation set in a firm place, it’s going to be impossible for us to achieve our long-term goals.”

The commissioner also said the CFL is starting to see some positive signs when it comes to the B.C., Montreal, and Toronto markets and the stability of those franchises.

Ambrosie said the league had undergone a product review late into 2021 and going into the 2022 season.

“We want to have the funnest, fastest, most-entertaining brand of football in the world,” he said.

He noted scoring was up by 17 per cent (about one more touchdown per game) and games averaged about 50 points during the 2022 regular season.

“That’s to say the games have been very entertaining,” Ambrosie said.

But it wasn’t all good news for the CFL, with some hiccups along the way.

One of the big ones was the divisional all-stars announcement that saw a number of the wrong players announced.

“When you make a mistake and you potentially hurt your players because you got that wrong, that’s something that should never happen,” Ambrosie said.

The issue was the fan voting and the fact the votes were weighted improperly.

“In our coaches and media balloting — which has always been our tradition — it was easy to calculate because it’s a small universe of voters, and each voter’s vote got the same weight as the others,” Ambrosie said.

“We agreed we would give the fan voting a relatively small weighting but what happened was every vote was given that weighting rather than the collective fan vote given that weighting. It skewed the results and the mistake we made was we didn’t do a double and triple check.”

Ambrosie also said the league and its broadcasting partner, TSN, have an eye on where the future of broadcasting is heading.

“That world is changing so much and changing so fast,” Ambrosie said. “(TSN) also acknowledges this business is changing and the way they think about it is changing.

“Right now we’re in the U.S. talking about our U.S. media rights and we’ve had some success. We’re not ready to make an announcement on our plan but we’ve been saying to everyone we’re talking to, they will be coterminous so that they will end in ’26 with our TSN arrangement so we can potentially think about more of a global scenario.”

One thing the league will no longer have to worry about for a few years is labour uncertainty. While there was a player strike this past training camp, the league and the players’ association came to an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement that will be in effect for seven years.

“This seven-year deal is transformational because what it is going to allow us to do now is rather than thinking about the next bargaining session or the next negotiation, we’re able now to think about how we can work together,” Ambrosie said.

The CFLPA’s State of the League address is set for Friday afternoon.