With Rookie Camps getting underway Wednesday, it's time to talk about the 2026 CFL season!

23 hours ago, Mike said:

"Best and most impactful" is literally an opinion, not a fact. He was not the most productive receiver in the league in 2025, either by volume or on a per-game basis. He is what he is at this point and I'm really of the belief that he's more of an electric highlight reel receiver than a winner, not to say he's not productive but he's not a player I'd be looking to add to my roster. He's a target vacuum who catches a relatively low percentage of the balls thrown his way.

One stat I've become a fairly big fan of is yards per target and Lawler registered at 10.02 last year.

Dohnte Meyers 12.13, Justin McInnis 10.82, Nic Demski 10.88, Keon Hatcher 11.64, Dejon Brissett 10.67 all more productive per target and all with a better balls caught % than Lawler too ... Lawler wasn't even the most reliable target on his team, he caught less of his targets (59.7%) than Kiondre Smith (73.5%) and Tim White (66.6%) and to me, that's a statistic that becomes even more impactful when you consider that he was 2nd in the league in targets with 144. The only receiver who really even comes close to being as unreliable as him with a comparable level of productivity is Eugene Lewis. Couple that with the fact that despite being targeted 144 times, Lawler didn't even rank in the top 25 in the CFL in YAC.

He's a highlight reel receiver, but he's not a winning football player. His numbers all point to the fact that he's productive, but he's also a relatively unimpressive player once the ball is in his hands and he's a drive killer. It's not a smear opinion on Lawler, I think he's a hell of a receiver and he's got some of the best go up and get it ability I've seen in a long time, but I just don't think it's anywhere near a fact that he's the "best" receiver in the CFL.

Yards per target is a flawed statistic in that it tries to measure a receiver's efficiency but doesn't account for route depth or QB play. It's also less sticky (predictive) in that it measures things outside a receiver's control (play calling, defence, target volume and overall QB play). To put this in context, yes, Lawler's yards per target was relatively "low" in your example (anything over 9.5 is generally considered pretty remarkable) but he also had the highest average depth of target in the league at 18.2 yards and high ADOT generally reflects a lower catch percentage and lower YAC total.

A better measure (and more predictive) statistic would be yards per route run because it strips away bias, measures overall offensive value and reflects a player's ability to both earn a target and do something with that target. Lawler has consistently put up elite numbers (top receiver's general post anywhere from 2.0 to 4.0 YPRR) and last year, Lawler was second in the league at 2.15 (behind only KeeSean Johnson at 2.29). His last year with the Bombers he posted a ridiculous 2.75 YPRR but he's consistently at the top of the CFL in this measure - it's part of the reason he got the bag he did.

Numbers are fun, right? Personally, I like to look at both YPRR and YAC independently but neither of those things replace the eye test. I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that Lawler isn't a playmaker with game breaking potential. In fact, every poster on this board has seen him single handedly take over games. Is he worth the money Hamilton paid? I don't think so but I'm not running the Cats.

13 minutes ago, wbbfan said:

wow not what i was expecting. I think i recall hearing they host some fight stuff.

DAZN is huge and the price just keeps going up every time they add more content. They carry every NFL game. Unfortunately I would guess that there is a very large portion of CFL fans who do not subscribe to DAZN. It's going to be a big uproar on the first Saturday night when thousands of fans can't find the game on TV. How many fans going to pay the 25-35/month for one CFL game per week?

1 minute ago, Atomic said:

DAZN is huge and the price just keeps going up every time they add more content. They carry every NFL game. Unfortunately I would guess that there is a very large portion of CFL fans who do not subscribe to DAZN. It's going to be a big uproar on the first Saturday night when thousands of fans can't find the game on TV. How many fans going to pay the 25-35/month for one CFL game per week?

my IPTV service I use on my streaming devices has a whack of DAZN channels in the Canadian Sports section...I pay I think 15 bucks a month and get like i dunno...5000+ channels tho I just remove all the listings for foreign stuff

1 hour ago, Rich said:

Current pricing for Dazn is $35 a month ($25 a month if you want to commit for the whole year). Through some gams on YouTube, will you need to pay for a YouTube subscription as well?

Yeah I'm not adding yet another subscription just for cfl. Guess it'll be cjob like back in the day and then wait for a pirated copy to hit the interwebs.

5 minutes ago, Booch said:

my IPTV service I use on my streaming devices has a whack of DAZN channels in the Canadian Sports section...I pay I think 15 bucks a month and get like i dunno...5000+ channels tho I just remove all the listings for foreign stuff

Same. Won't affect me at all unless my IPTV service gets nuked.

9 minutes ago, Booch said:

my IPTV service I use on my streaming devices has a whack of DAZN channels in the Canadian Sports section...I pay I think 15 bucks a month and get like i dunno...5000+ channels tho I just remove all the listings for foreign stuff

Same. Won't affect me at all. But I'm sure for many who use legitimate services it will be a shock.

11 hours ago, JuranBoldenRules said:

The real problem isn't paying Kenny Lawler 300k a year or not.

The problem is our US scouting has been the absolute shits going on 5 years. Can't win sustainably like that. Yeah we can go buy free agents, like Broxton, Ceresna, pay someone like Lawler. The fact we can hardly even find good US players let alone impactful ones basically since Schoen, Holm is a major problem. You win when you find those guys.

You could pay Lawler and he could break his arm or drive drunk, not renew his visa or whatever and not be playing anyways. You need a steady stream of good players to win. When we had that, we won. Now we're grasping at being a 9-10 win team.

Yep the loss of Rigmaiden has very much affected us imo. We just aren't finding the impact players we need to keep the cupboards full. We can all grouse about letting our guys get too long in the tooth, but nobody is behind them pushing them out.

46 minutes ago, wbbfan said:

wow not what i was expecting. I think i recall hearing they host some fight stuff.

Yes, they've had fights on there for years. They've aired a ton of big boxing matches (Canelo often has his fights on there) and have even shown UFC stuff (for non-US markets) in the past but it's mainly Bellator, PFL & KSW for MMA.

Love that the spot rates for Corus, Harvard and others just went up... Radio broadcasts on Saturday night is A-OK for me ...

The one good thing will be that this is expected to be a significant windfall for the league (I saw the number $500 million over 6 years floated around but that's just baseless Internet talk) and the salary cap will be going way up. It won't last long though when DAZN finds out that nobody's going to pay for their service ..

Edited 49 minutes ago49 min by Noeller

4 minutes ago, Noeller said:

Love that the spit rates for Corus, Harvard and others just went up... Radio broadcasts on Saturday night is A-OK for me ...

The one good thing will be that this is expected to be a significant windfall for the league (I saw the number $500 million over 6 years floated around but that's just baseless Internet talk) and the salary cap will be going way up. It won't last long though when DAZN finds out that nobody's going to pay for their service ..

Ya, I don't like having to use DAZN too but if the $$$ is really good for the league and will keep the league alive, so be it.

34 minutes ago, bigg jay said:

Same. Won't affect me at all unless my IPTV service gets nuked.

yeah I been with same one for yrs...never any issue

So Dru Brown demoted to 2nd string by the looks of it. I wonder is this is just Dinwiddie mind games, or just wanting to get a way better look at Maier? Not sure what to make of this? Will Ottawa keep Brown at his salary to sit as 2nd string? Keep in mind they have 3 other QBs that looked very impressive in preseason game 1. Would Ottawa cut Brown loose or trade him? Would we be open to bringing him back if there was the possibility? I WOULD. At any rate, whoever shakes loose from Ottawa, I would be very interested in bringing in and having a look see. They can't keep them all. Dinwiddie is very impressive in his ability to guru QBs. What he got out of Arbuckle the last 2 seasons after his career looked DOA, how he got Kelly playing very good ball in a short amount of time etc.

Edited 4 minutes ago4 min by GCn20