Happy holidays friends!<\/p>\n
With the festive season in full swing, and with 2026 fast approaching, CFL.ca has been rolling out all kinds of great year-end content over the last few weeks. There will be plenty of time to preview free agency and the CFL Draft, but we also need to pay homage to what was an outstanding season.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, and with a little holiday flare, here are a few gifts teams received over the course of 2025.<\/p>\n
RELATED ANOTHER YEAR OF TREVOR HARRIS FOR THE ROUGHRIDERS<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I mean, let\u2019s be honest: the best thing Saskatchewan received in 2025 was the 112th Grey Cup. But that was no gift. The Roughriders were the league\u2019s best team from wire to wire and raised their game to another level in a pair of playoff wins. That wouldn\u2019t have happened without quarterback Trevor Harris<\/a> at the helm.<\/p>\n And while retirement was contemplated, Harris gave fans in Regina an early gift when he signed on for another year earlier this month<\/a>. Culminating with Grey Cup MVP honours, it\u2019s hard to argue 2025 was the best year of Harris\u2019s career. During the regular season, Harris led the league by completing 73.6 per cent of his passes while recording 4,549 passing yards, 24 touchdowns, and a 110.7 quarterback rating.<\/p>\n SEAN WHYTE\u2019S HISTORIC SEASON FOR THE LIONS<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Lions surged to an 11-7 record in 2025 for many reasons, and the work of Sean Whyte<\/a> was undoubtedly one of them. The league\u2019s number one scoring offence was helped along by Whyte making 39 of 41 field tries, which translated to a spectacular 95.1 per cent accuracy rate.<\/p>\n Already the owner of three of the 10 most accurate campaigns in league history, Whyte\u2019s season goes down as the second best we\u2019ve ever seen. The only kicker with a more accurate year than what we just saw from Whyte came from Ottawa\u2019s Lewis Ward<\/a> in 2018 at 98.1 per cent. Oh, and Whyte got his signature moment, too, when he booted the game winner as time expired in the Western Semi-Final.<\/p>\n KENNY LAWLER IN FREE AGENCY FOR THE TIGER-CATS<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Expectations were high when the Ticats signed Kenny Lawler<\/a> to a two-year contract in February. And he absolutely shattered them. In his first year with Hamilton, Lawler led the league with a career high 14 touchdown catches while finishing second overall with 1,443 receiving yards. The fit with quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell<\/a> felt like it was meant to be.<\/p>\n And with Mitchell back for two more years (another holiday present)<\/a>, that connection is set to continue in 2026. Lawler was Mitchell\u2019s number one target last season, looking his way 144 times overall. And I guess it shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone that Hamilton also led the league with 36 passing touchdowns.<\/p>\n A TIMELY DAVIS ALEXANDER RETURN FOR THE ALOUETTES<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Als were 3-0 and looked like a legitimate powerhouse when Davis Alexander<\/a> went down with injury in late June. When he returned for Week 17, Montreal was a .500 team trying to scratch out an East Division playoff spot and get on some sort of roll down the stretch. Thanks in large part to Alexander, the Alouettes accomplished both goals and then some.<\/p>\n Montreal rattled off three straight wins upon Alexander\u2019s return to the lineup, clinched second in the East, and entered the playoffs with a ton of momentum. Alexander was then outstanding in a pair of playoff wins, throwing for 594 yards and recording three touchdowns before finally being slowed down in a hard-fought Grey Cup loss.<\/p>\n A RETURN TO THE PLAYOFFS FOR THE STAMPEDERS<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n After two miserable seasons where the Stamps won a combined 11 games and saw their run of consecutive playoff appearances end at 19, optimism was high entering 2025. Calgary had shuffled their coaching staff, acquired star quarterback Vernon Adams Jr.<\/a>, and overhauled their defensive personnel. It was clear the prior two years simply weren\u2019t acceptable.<\/p>\n And then the team got off to a stellar start. With wins in five of their first six, the Stampeders set the tone for a successful season early on. En route to an 11-7 finish, Adams Jr. lived up to expectations while new stars like Jaylon Hutchings<\/a>, Dedrick Mills<\/a>, and Clarence Hicks<\/a> emerged. In the end, Calgary just narrowly missed their first playoff win since 2018 with a last minute loss in the Western Semi-Final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Happy holidays friends! With the festive season in full swing, and with 2026 fast approaching, CFL.ca has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[49,48,521,522,520,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-361938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cfl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-canadian-football-league","11":"tag-canadianfootballleague","12":"tag-cfl","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u00bb\u00a0View the entire 2026 schedule<\/a>
\u00bb\u00a0MMQB: 4 players who keep finding new heights<\/a>
\u00bb\u00a05 faces in new places that impacted 2025<\/a>
\u00bb\u00a03 records that were broken in 2025<\/a>
\u00bb\u00a0Subscribe to the CFL\u2019s newsletter for exclusive offers and league updates<\/a><\/p>\n