Forums

good call on Bill Elgart, really like his playing.

The Grey Cup contest is now up!   Go play!

It's that time of year again! It's time for the annual Grey Cup contest. Past winners have included Noj (twice), indestructible, Bright Moments, brownie, paul secor, Soulstation1, danasgoodstuff, B. Clugston (twice), ejp626 (twice), BFrank (three times), kh1958, Big Al and GregK. ***** The rules: 1) Pick the winning team. 2) Pick the number of total points scored by both teams (aka the tiebreaker). Since approximately half of us will pick the winning team, picking the total points is necessary to win the contest. Your total points prediction must be a number which is a multiple of five (5). The winning tiebreaker will be the one closest to the correct answer. If two are equally close, the winner will be the lower pick. If two people pick the same thing, the first to make the pick will be the winner. ***** The prize:  1) If you live in the US or Canada, your prize will be a surprise package of jazz CDs, jazz books or Canadian football books! 2) If you live anywhere else, your prize will be a $20 Amazon gift card! ***** The contest deadline:  Sunday Nov. 16, 6:00 pm eastern ***** The Grey Cup Final: The Grey Cup is awarded to the world champion of what I think is the greatest game in the world, Canadian-style rugby football. That is to say, the champion of the Canadian Football League. The Grey Cup was first awarded in 1909. They have played for it every year since then, except three years because of World War One and 2020 because of the covid virus.  Therefore, this year's game will be the 112th Grey Cup Final.  Fans from throughout Canada will attend the game in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  The game sold out even before it was determined who the teams would be.  Winnipeg after sunset is always cold in mid-November. This year's game will see the Eastern champion Montreal Alouettes face the Western champion Saskatchewan Roughriders. 2025 was a crazy year.  Every team suffered injuries to important players, so the teams' won-lost records did not reflect how good the teams would have been if everyone had been healthy. Saskatchewan won close games throughout the year in an unimpressive fashion.  Their record was 14-2 when they clinched first place.  For the final two games, they played their subs, and nearly won them too.  Their quarterback is Trevor Harris, who at 39 is the second-oldest player in the league.  Harris spent about ten years bouncing around as a back-up before getting to start.  Now he has the savvy of a 39-year old with the body of a 30-year old, because he didn't get beaten up for ten years while sitting on the bench. Montreal's quarterback is a young guy in his first year as a starter named Davis Alexander.  He missed a number of games due to a thigh injury, but when he played he went undefeated! Winnipeg is northwest of Minneapolis, so I expect the majority of the fans present will be westerners rooting for the Riders.  However, the Riders are the big rival of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, so the locals might be rooting for the Als to beat them! Today the Bombers are 2.5 point favorites. You can watch the news unfold on the CFL thread. ***** The game will be televised live worldwide (except in Canada and the US) for free on the league's website, cfl.ca, starting at 6:00 pm eastern Sunday.   https://www.cfl.ca/plus In Canada, the game will be on CTV, TSN and RDS.  In the US, the game will be on the CBS Sports Network cable channel, which can be streamed on Hulu and YouTubeTV, and is shown by sports bars with the DirectTV sports package. ***** In the US, streaming the radio broadcast will be tricky.  Because of a dispute regarding royalty payments, iHeart Radio does not allow streaming of their Canadian stations to the US.  However, you can work around that if you have a VPN program.  Set your VPN to Canada, and then go here: https://www.iheart.com/live/tsn-1050-7495/ To listen to the game, you will need to sign up with iHeart Radio first.  So you might want to plan ahead to do that. ***** Good luck everyone! ***** Here's my pick: The Riders have fooled me all year long, winning game after game in an unimpressive fashion.  So I wouldn't be surprised if they do it again. However, the Als' Davis Alexander is undefeated as a starting quarterback.  I'm going to expect him to continue to win every week until he doesn't. MONTREAL - 50 points

Thanks for putting this all together and starting the thread. Definitely will explore this bc I'm not familiar with much of Stitt's work in collaboration with the organ.