CALGARY \u2014 The Winnipeg Blue Bombers charged out of the gate to start their 2026 CFL season by beating a team they couldn’t last year.<\/p>\n
The Bombers defeated the host Calgary Stampeders 30-28 in a tug of war that ended with Sergio Castillo’s walkoff field goal from 38 yards out for the win Friday at McMahon Stadium.<\/p>\n
Winnipeg, which went 0-3 against Calgary last season, trailed by a point with 64 seconds remaining. <\/p>\n
Stampeders quarterback Vernon Adams Jr., had just marched his offence out of Calgary’s end zone and 104 yards down field for the quarterback to score on a three-yard dash.<\/p>\n
Bombers quarterback Zach Collaros connecting with Ontaria Wilson on a 27-yard throw, plus five- and eight-yard carries by running back Brady Oliveira, put Winnipeg in range for Castillo.<\/p>\n
“It was a wild game,” Collaros said. “Pure CFL football right there. The conditions were crazy. The wind was nuts pretty much the entire game. I thought we did a good job of handling that in all three phases and playing high IQ football.<\/p>\n
“It just feels good, coming to somebody’s house and winning a game.”<\/p>\n
Wind gusts up to 57 km\/h out of the southwest at kickoff switched directions by the start of the second half.<\/p>\n
Oliveira, Tim White and Bryce Perkins scored touchdowns for the visitors. Castillo produced 11 kicking points, including two of the three punt singles Winnipeg scored in the game.<\/p>\n
Winnipeg’s defence tightened in the second half after giving up three touchdowns to trail 21-16 at halftime. <\/p>\n
Adams was sacked three times in the fourth quarter \u2014 twice by Jake Ceresna and once by Willie Jefferson. <\/p>\n
“All three phases certainly came through, but we ended up getting to Vernon quite a bit, I guess, in that second half,” Blue Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea said. “Great effort by the front and that relentless sort of pass rush, which was right on time.”<\/p>\n
Ceresna recorded three sacks in his debut for Winnipeg. Friday’s game was his first since last September’s Labour Day game at McMahon Stadium when he was an Edmonton Elk. <\/p>\n
The 31-year-old shut his 2025 season down after that game to deal with a knee injury.<\/p>\n
“This is where my season ended last year, so I just wanted to make sure I had a great game and kind of right the ship,” Ceresna said. <\/p>\n
“I was hurt a lot of last year, so it felt good to just be running out there and kind of feeling back like myself again.”<\/p>\n
Collaros completed 17 of 28 pass attempts for 233 yards, a touchdown throw and one interception.<\/p>\n
Dedrick Mills and backup quarterback Quincy Vaughn each scored short-yardage touchdowns and Erik Brooks had a touchdown catch for Calgary.<\/p>\n
Adams was 17 for 27 in passing for 239 yards and one touchdown throw. <\/p>\n
“Long season. No one wins or loses the Grey Cup in Game 1,” Adams said.<\/p>\n
Calgary’s Jude McAtamney kicked four converts, but missed a 45-yard field goal attempt in the third quarter in front of an announced crowd of 17,743 at McMahon Stadium.<\/p>\n
“When you play Winnipeg, I swear, it comes down to a kick 50 per cent of the time or more. They made theirs,” Stampeders head coach and general manager Dave Dickenson.<\/p>\n
“They outplayed us in the second half big time. <\/p>\n
“In the CFL, you get opportunities to win these close games, you’ve got to win them, especially at home.”<\/p>\n
The Stampeders went 11-7 last season to finish third in the West Division ahead of the Blue Bombers at 10-8. <\/p>\n
Winnipeg crossed over and fell 42-33 to the Montreal Alouettes in the East semifinal. Calgary lost 33-30 to the B.C. Lions in the West semifinal.<\/p>\n
Friday’s first half featured a running backs duel. Mills, the CFL’s leading rusher in 2025, ran for 95 yards and a touchdown and Oliveira for 75 yards and a touchdown. <\/p>\n
Mills finished with 112 yards on 16 carries and Oliveira compiled 113 on 15 in the game.<\/p>\n
Collaros, 37, was coming off a mediocre 2025 by his standards with almost as many interceptions (16) as touchdown throws (17). His 3,048 passing yards was his lowest total in five years.<\/p>\n
Friday’s game was the quarterback’s first under new offensive coordinator Tommy Condell.<\/p>\n
“I felt good,” Collaros said. “There will definitely be some things to clean up. I can think of two or three off the top of my head where decisions that I made, I would have liked to go elsewhere with the football in those moments. But for the first game, I thought we did a pretty good job.”<\/p>\n
Calgary was minus veteran kicker Ren\u00e9 Paredes (groin) and defensive linemen Folarin Orimolade (Achilles) and Jaylon Hutchings (hamstring). <\/p>\n
Paredes’ run of 247 consecutive CFL games since his 2011 debut came to an end. First-round global draft pick McAtamney of Derry, Northern Ireland, drew in Friday for Paredes.<\/p>\n
Up Next:<\/p>\n
Stampeders: Bye week.<\/p>\n
Blue Bombers: Home-opener Thursday against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 5, 2026.<\/p>\n
Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CALGARY \u2014 The Winnipeg Blue Bombers charged out of the gate to start their 2026 CFL season by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,82,22073],"class_list":["post-718584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718584","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=718584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}