From the 2004-05 to 2018-19 SJHL seasons, 10 of the league’s 12 teams qualified for the playoffs each year \u2014 compared to eight in previous seasons. Then in the spring of 2019, the SJHL decided to revert back to having eight teams in the postseason. It meant eliminating a play-in “wild card” or “survivor” series.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been talking about the Wild Card (Survivor Series) for a number of years,” then-SJHL president Bill Chow said at the time<\/a>. “It’s time to move on. I don’t think anybody ever believed in the Wild Card.”<\/p>\n This week, CBC News interviewed current SJHL commissioner Kyle McIntyre about the league’s previous experience with the expanded playoff format.<\/p>\n Pros and cons<\/p>\n “The attempt was to get more teams involved in the playoffs because as everybody knows, the postseason is where a lot of teams generate additional dollars,” McIntyre said, adding there’s heightened awareness and greater attendance, as a lot of non-traditional fans will attend playoff games because of the excitement.<\/p>\n McIntyre said most SJHL franchises are run on an operational budget of about $800,000 a year and many are not-for-profit organizations.<\/p>\n “By having more teams qualify for the playoffs, you have a better chance of having more teams in the black, opposed to being in the red, at the end of the year,” McIntyre said.<\/p>\n As for the downside, “it might water down the concept of playoffs,” he said.<\/p>\n “I think the play-in concept worked well for a short period of time, but for a long period of time, it really wasn’t as sustainable.”<\/p>\n He said interest waned, and the league governors felt it was important to go back to eight teams qualifying out of 12 “for competitive balance and to make the games competitive throughout the regular season.”<\/p>\n McIntyre said the SJHL is blessed with a lot of league parity, noting it has 336 regular season games and, this year, it came down to Game 335 before the final playoff team qualified.<\/p>\n He said that generates a lot of fan and community interest. Whereas in the past, he said, if a team had to play in to qualify for the playoffs, it still might struggle at the gate.<\/p>\n “A cynical fan might say, ‘Oh, you know, this is just another attempt to get our entertainment dollars,'” McIntyre said.<\/p>\n “So if a team didn’t stand a legitimate chance of actually qualifying for the playoffs, it wouldn’t necessarily guarantee playoff success or greater attendance for the playoffs.”<\/p>\n CFL’s plan has SJHL commish’s interest<\/p>\n McIntyre, a Saskatchewan Roughriders fan who went to last year’s Grey Cup, said he attends a lot of CFL games throughout the year.<\/p>\n He said from his perspective as a fan, he thinks the CFL’s move is “economically-driven,” as it’s adding revenue potential for the teams that might not traditionally make the postseason.<\/p>\n McIntyre also said he thinks fans are skeptical.<\/p>\n “I think if people understood what the big picture was, if the commissioner came out and said, ‘This is all about economics, this is about making all our teams viable, this is about making our league viable,’ I think it would be more palatable for the fans,” McIntyre said.<\/p>\n “But when fans just hear, ‘We’re adding additional teams, we’re adding additional playoff formats,’ people are saying, ‘Then why are we competing through the regular season?'”<\/p>\n WATCH | Saskatchewan Roughriders president and CEO Craig Reynolds talk about the CFL’s new playoff format: ‘There’s a lot of change’: Riders CEO welcomes earlier season, new playoff format<\/p>\n Saskatchewan Roughridgers president and CEO Craig Reynolds speaks to the media after the Canadian Football League announces big changes. The CFL will kick off its season earlier and revamp its playoff format in 2027. Eight of the league’s nine teams will make the post-season and there will be three rounds before the Grey Cup game rather than two (division semifinal, final).<\/p>\n In its online news release<\/a> and FAQ<\/a> about why it’s making the change, the CFL didn’t mention economics, money or revenue.<\/p>\n Instead, it said the new format is designed to create more meaningful games, better summer experiences for fans and a more competitive path to the Grey Cup.<\/p>\n McIntyre said it’s an interesting concept and it will be interesting to see what the outcome is for the CFL.<\/p>\n Willing to try something new<\/p>\n Sports broadcaster Darren Dupont, who regularly covers the CFL and was the voice of the SJHL’s Kindersley Klippers shortly after the league changed its playoff format to 10 teams, said it wasn’t a big deal at the time, it was just the way it was.<\/p>\n He said while the survivor series were “really exciting and very compelling,” making the playoffs didn’t mean a lot and teams knew they were going to get in unless they were really bad.<\/p>\n Now that the SJHL has changed back to eight of 12 teams qualifying for the postseason, he said making the playoffs means something.<\/p>\n “It’s a big accomplishment. You can put that on your resume,” he said.<\/p>\n However, Dupont said the SJHL’s move showed him the league was willing to try something new.<\/p>\n “They gave it a really good run,” he said. “And they were willing to go back and say, ‘OK, maybe this isn’t quite the right way to do it.’<\/p>\n “And so it tells me that it’s not impossible, that if this doesn’t work, the league (CFL) could go back to the old format. Doesn’t mean that it’s locked in forever.”<\/p>\n Dupont said he loves that the CFL is being creative and trying new things to grow the game, but he’s not a fan of eight of nine teams making the playoffs.<\/p>\n “It waters down the regular season. It takes away that accomplishment of making the playoffs,” he said.<\/p>\n He said if it’s just about football, he doesn’t think there’s a need to change the CFL playoff format, arguing it is highly competitive and the regular season is very compelling. <\/p>\n “The playoffs are fantastic because it’s hard to make the playoffs,” he said.<\/p>\n Dupont said he thinks finances had to be part of the league’s decision and he’s curious to see how it goes.<\/p>\n “This league, as we know, is not traditionally flush with cash. And financials are always an issue, especially at the team level,” he said.<\/p>\n “If things are going to help those teams be more healthy financially, I think you have to look at it, and as a fan, you kind of have to be OK with certain things if it’s going to help the growth, the sustainability, the financial health of the league.”<\/p>\n CBC Saskatchewan’s weekday afternoon current affairs program, The 306, has requested to interview CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston, but as of late Thursday had not yet received a response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Canadian Football League is implementing a change the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League (SJHL) tried for several years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[49,48,521,522,520,82],"class_list":["post-644922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canadian-football-league","tag-canadianfootballleague","tag-cfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644922","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=644922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777640900_419_default.jpg\")
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