Nobody in the CFL had tried a schedule like this since 26 August 1995. The four games produced 220 points between them, and Edmonton sealed a play-off place early by taking Calgary apart.
Toronto and Ottawa went first, and the home side scraped through 26-23. For an hour or so it looked as though the whole day might stay that tight. It did not. Winnipeg beat Saskatchewan 19-6 after that, Edmonton put 53-16 on Calgary, and British Columbia, last of the four, closed the night out at 48-29 against Montreal. Kick-offs moved east to west at three-hour gaps, from 1pm through 4pm and 7pm to 10pm Eastern, which is a full working day of football if you sat through the lot. Roughly 55 points a game across the four, if you like your averages, and the winning margins after the opener ran from 13 to 37.
Half of the card, to be fair, arranged itself. The Banjo Bowl in Winnipeg always falls on the first weekend after the Labour Day Classic, and British Columbia hosted Montreal eight days after playing them away. So three of the four games were rematches. Toronto against Ottawa was the only one without that recent history.
The whole day was sold as a single event, too. It went out as the Forty Creek Quadruple Header, named after the league's official whisky partner, with TSN carrying all four games. Twelve hours of coverage means four advertising windows in a row rather than one. Gambling has lived in those breaks for several seasons now, and FanDuel and theScore Bet, both of which operate in Ontario and Alberta, are listed as the CFL's official sports betting and casino partners. The same advertising segment also takes in the online casino Spinchester Casino, which announces its latest releases and its catalogue of slots at https://spinchesteruk.com/. Which adverts actually ran that Saturday is another question, and nobody outside the league can answer it, because broadcast logs are not published.
A fourth straight win puts the Elks at 10-3 after 13 games. They stay top of the West, with a play-off place for the first time since 2019. The box score gives Cody Fajardo 14 of 21 for 232 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions, the sort of line that usually has a comfortable scoreboard behind it. Joshua Cephus took six receptions for 119 yards, and ShunDerrick Powell ran for 97. The Elks won the second half 34-6, and that is becoming a habit of theirs: across the four-game run they have outscored opponents 112-22 after the interval. Probably the number that defines their September.
Calgary got it twice in six days. Edmonton took the Labour Day Classic 38-28 on 7 September and then, by way of a follow-up, handed them another 37-point beating in the return fixture. Five wins now separate the Alberta rivals. At 5-8 the Stampeders are into the territory where they need other results to fall their way, and there is no kind way to phrase that.
Winnipeg were answering an overtime defeat from the week before, and the answer was a grinding 19-6. Redha Kramdi, back after six weeks out, forced a fumble and picked off Trevor Harris in front of a derby crowd of 32,343. Brady Oliveira ran for 100 yards on 14 carries, which in a game that tight counts as an afternoon's work on its own. Out on the west coast they scored rather more freely. British Columbia had lost 37-30 away to Montreal on 4 September, and the home rematch finished 48-29.
Saturday belonged to the CFL alone, with the main slate of the opening NFL weekend not arriving until the next day. Why the league waited 31 years to do this again, it never said. The obvious argument against is that four consecutive games split the audience's attention across broadcasts. The league claimed the opposite afterwards and announced that three of the four were TSN's highest-rated programmes of the week. No viewing figures came with it.
The West is now more or less settled. Edmonton sit top, Montreal have their play-off place too, and Calgary are left hoping somebody slips. The next few rounds decide which western side crosses over into the eastern play-off bracket.