Landry's 5 takeaways from Week 12

Hello, league brass.

I don’t mean to tell you your business but isn’t it time for the CFL to start alerting local air traffic authorities when Willie Jefferson and his long, swatting arms are in town?

Here are the Week 12 takeaways.

GAME ON

The Calgary Stampeders are the black fly in the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ chardonnay.

The only team to beat the Roughriders this season, the Stamps have done it twice and done it convincingly each time, including Saturday’s 32-15 home win.

Due to that, we have a real battle for top spot in the West as we make the OK Tire Labour Day Weekend turn for the home stretch.

And this fight comes with the added bonus that neither of these teams has gimmes coming up in the traditional home-and-home sets that are on the horizon.

If the Stamps and Riders have been the West’s best so far this season (they have), it’s no longer a given that they are heads and shoulders above the fray, at least not at the given moment.

The Riders will play a solid Blue Bombers team that might have cracked the code to consistent winning football (maybe it’s not really “cracking” a code when you had it all along. See below), while the Stampeders will take on an Edmonton Elks squad that seems to have done the same.

Had the Roughriders won on Saturday, they might well have jogged to first place.

But now the Stamps are just two points behind and hold the tiebreaker card.

It’s game on at the top of the West.

COPY THAT. LOUD AND CLEAR

The message has been received.

Brady’s back.

We’d been used to seeing running back Brady Oliveira dominate for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers over the last few years.

And when he wasn’t dominating a game, many of us often asked: Why didn’t they give him the ball more?

In 2025, an early season injury slowed the 2024 MOP/MOC down and may have had the Bombers’ braintrust treating Oliveira with kid gloves in order not to further damage him.

In Thursday night’s win in Montreal, Oliveira was back at full steam, rushing 16 times for 137 yards and a touchdown, and catching nine passes for a further 73 yards. And 72 of those yards were YAC.

That’s kinda, sorta, a 200-yard rushing game, y’all.

Brady’s back, rushing through and over people and dragging piles along with him. And he’s slapping that helmet of his after big rushes. He’s feeling it.

And just time for the annual back-to-backers against Saskatchewan.

Can Brady Oliveira power the Blue Bombers into the first-place fray?

WE HAVEN’T BEEN TALKING ABOUT NICK ARBUCKLE ENOUGH

I felt inspired to write the headline to this takeaway as the Toronto/BC game approached halftime on Saturday, even without knowing how things would turn out in the end.

That’s because I felt I’d seen enough of Argo quarterback Nick Arbuckle’s performance — on top of his other recent performances — to feel that it was merited.

Aside from a slow start to the season, where Arbuckle flashed in outings that nevertheless were rightly downgraded to “meh” due to fumbles and interceptions, the veteran QB started playing good football weeks and weeks ago.

And recently, he’d been doing more than that. He’d been playing really great football, despite mounting Toronto losses. Whatever the Argo troubles were, you could not have fairly said it was quarterbacking.

On Saturday, Arbuckle took things to the sensational level, throwing three touchdown passes and piling up 430 yards against the Lions.

Keep that up and the nickname “Airbuckle” might stick.

We hadn’t been talking enough about Nick Arbuckle but he sure took care of that with Saturday’s performance.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO FIND A WAY TO FIND A WAY

“I don’t think I played my best game by any means,” Edmonton quarterback Cody Fajardo told TSN after his team’s 30-20 win in Ottawa.

Then, he dropped a little Yogi Berra style philosophy on us.

“But we found a way to find a way.”

Fajardo described the game as “weird,” and perhaps that means something only a pro quarterback can really understand, experiencing things as they do in the maelstrom of high-speed crunching and criss-crossing bodies.

At any rate, Fajardo felt he had to do a lot of upstream swimming against the REDBLACKS and that might not be a bad thing, prep-wise, considering his next test comes against a very, very good Calgary defence.

Another opportunity to find a way to find a way. That’s something the Elks have been doing a lot of since Fajardo took over as starting quarterback.

YOU CAN EXPECT TO SEE MORE OF THAT

STAMPS STRIKE AGAIN FOR SIX!#CFLGameDay
📅: Roughriders vs @calstampeders is LIVE NOW!
🇨🇦: TSN
🌎: CFL+ pic.twitter.com/RaN9rvHwLj

— CFL (@CFL) August 23, 2025

Calgary receiver Jalen Philpot had a very nice day against Saskatchewan on Saturday.

His three receptions for 51 yards included a score that showed off some incredible body control magic, coming on a streeeeetch for the goal line while he kept the rest of his body from touching down prior to the ball hitting the stripe. Core strength, everybody. Core strength.

It was his first touchdown of the season and that had Philpot jazzed, but so did something else; his increased touch load in the running game.

With three rushes for 31 yards, Philpot got to remember what it was like to be a running back, something that he was prior to converting to receiver when he was at the University of Calgary.

“He’s a weapon,” said Stampeders head coach Dave Dickenson after the game. “We gotta use him. We can’t just (use) him as a receiver. He can run, he’s smart.”

“Just trying to get the ball, make plays wherever I can,” said Philpot. Whether that’s taking hand-offs, it doesn’t really matter to me.”

Full Philpot mode: Activated.

AND FINALLY: You piqued our interest with that hurdle two weeks ago, Jake Herslow, but now you’ve really got our attention.

Landry’s 5 takeaways from Week 12

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