Retro Pro Football 🏈 cards for Les Alouettes de Montreal and the Toronto Argonauts of the 1981 CFL Eastern Division
Lineupscfl6-30.pdf (PDFs of the 1981 Montreal Alouettes and Toronto Argonauts)
Rosters 1981-Argonauts-and-Alouettes.docx
Note to my Canadian friends (this means you, Nez1, jiggypop, leespurge, and the rest !) I promised you guys Canadian football teams, but not necessarily good Canadian football teams. These are fun prototypes for scrimmages though, and I will eventually build this out.
The 1981 CFL season was its 28th, but it is considered the 24th official season. It’s a very cool season to me because it has the original lineup of nine Canadian- only teams in two divisions; 1981 was the first CFL year where every team played the other teams “home and home” for a balanced schedule. The CFL then had both Rough Riders and Roughriders, with the latter based then (as now) in Saskatchewan and the former in Ottawa, now called the Redblacks.
I’ve chosen 1981 because long ago a guy named Gerry Parsh sent me a mountain of info on this season when he left the hobby, including bits from a game called “Sports Action Football”. Sports Action Football looked a lot like APBA, suspiciously so, but when I realized you could card a defense to have a twelfth man in coverage I immediately saw the Strat-O- Matic possibilities. I owe Gerry a deep debt; he loved both the CFL and Fifties NFL Football.
Sports Action Football Rules, c1977
And being a Detroiter, I loved Canada, from Ouellete Street, to the Queen’s Highway, from the Gardens (and Seagrams VO plant) in nearby Amherstburg to the Windsor Ballet.
They did things differently in Canada; laundry detergent and petrol pumps there had instructions in two languages and you paid by the litre. While the Tigers stacked their lineups with slow moving lefties who took dead aim at the overhang in right field with middling success, the Expos stole Ron LeFlore, our only decent baserunner, in 1980 and then swiped 237 bases in a season, about a decade’s worth of work in Detroit. I watched all this on CBC, along with the CFL, when I got lucky and they were televised.
For these two teams 1981 was a season of change. The Montreal Alouettes had won Grey Cups in 1970 and 1977 but had fallen on hard times, and they chased respectability by bringing in “imports”, in many cases players with NFL experience. Chief among these for 1981 was Vince Ferragamo, who had taken the Rams to Super Bowl XIV and had thrown 30 TDs in 1980. In 1981, Ferragamo jumped to the Montreal Alouettes, thanks to a $600,000-a-year contract. This was a large amount back in the day even by NFL standards, especially compared to $250,000 the Rams offered him, and the $47,500 they had paid him for his fine work in 1980. Being immobile in a mobile QB’s league, Ferragamo had a difficult time adjusting to the style of the CFL, completing 175 of 342 passes (51.2%) for 2,175 yards, with only seven touchdown passes against 25 interceptions. He was demoted to the backup position for Gerry Dattilio in the latter half of the season and then to third-string quarterback for the final three games after Ken Johnson arrived from Calgary in a trade.
The Alouettes had David Overstreet from Oklahoma, the leading ball carrier in the East Division, a CFL Hall of Famer in end Peter Della Riva, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson had one good year up there before coming back to the NFL in 1982, and they fielded an All-Canadian receiver in former Chicago Bears star James Scott. But they could not put all the pieces together and finished 3-13. Amazingly enough they made the playoffs under the tiered system of the time, but their season ended when they got pipped by Ottawa 20-16 in the first round.
Ferragamo’s contract sank the Alouettes. Suffering big losses the team folded with $2m in debt after 1981, and Nelson Skalbania was replaced under new ownership by Charles Bronfman, the owner of the Expos. The team was renamed the Concordes, but they would soon reorganize again, and they would not be Grey Cup winners until 2002.
The Toronto Argonauts are the New York Yankees of the CFL, but no self-respecting Canadian will appreciate the parallel even if there is some truth to it. They have won the most (19) Grey Cups including this past year’s contest, in 2024. But during this arcane post-War period they actually went 31 years between Cups, starting on November 29, 1952 and ending on November 27, 1983. Argo QB Condredge Holloway is a good example of a good QB on a bad team; he had help in players Bruce Clark and Bob Gaddis, but while his season was up and down, Holloway’s surrounding cast wasn’t healthy or explosive, and the defense was terrible. Better days were ahead for Holloway, who would be the outstanding player in the CFL the next year. The 1981 Argos finished 2-14 and were knocked out of the running for the East playoffs in the season’s final week.
A few comments on Rouges/ Simples and the game in general;
The kickers have red numbers in their FG misses. If you hit this number or range it’s an automatic single. But if you miss a FG then the other team follows this sequence of play:
- roll three six sided dice for how far back in the end zone the kick lands, (ie “12” is twelve yards deep);
- Roll two dice if the team has two kick returners (retourners de botte d’envoi) 2-7 is the #1 back; 8-12 is the #2 back;
- The team can either concede the point and take it at their 35 or bring it out. These decisions are the essence of Canadian Football strategy;
- If the defensive team does bring it out kick return yardage is DOUBLED. This reflects that these returns (then as now!) are very dangerous plays; it is usually better strategy, unless at the end of a half as the offense, to punt than kick a 50 yarder. You can look it up, kick returns in these situations lead to big plays. (You know this if you were watching the Argo's Derek Slywka this past weekend against Ottawa !);
- If the returner makes it out he saves the point;
- This is true for punts, too, and the CFL end zone is 25 yards deep in 1981. So a 54 yard punt from the 30 would be just inside the end line, -24 yards. Punt returners should not get the double bonus, though, so in many cases the possible poor field position is worth conceding the point. A punt downed in the end zone (which is rare) is a single.
- Don’t forget a CFL field is 110 yards, as in 40….50…C…50….40 so an eight yard gain from your 52 is down to the opponent’s 50. This explains the onsides kick chart!
- It’s the three minute warning that stops play near the end of each half. Running plays should take 45 seconds.
- Yes, I have the data and I will probably make a penalties chart at some point, but they are (naturellement) different au Canada 🇨🇦 and even more so then versus now. This will take some thought;
- Don’t forget the CFL uses three downs. It is surprising how much first down running they tried, however. An optional rule would be to use the draw play from the modern SOM game, removing defenders on pass calls but also counting as a key on a basic run call. The teams would also go for it on third and short in some cases, then as now, and especially Tom Higgins, the modern day Alouettes coach who attempts this about a fifth of the time avec Les Jeux de “Dan Campbell.”
- Almost forgot! Wingback is a tool position in the CFL, especially the old CFL. These two teams used the position essentially for a third WR (so two runners, a TE and 3WR) and kept their backs in to block. But a team like Ottawa used TE/ BB/ FB type guys and ran them as a third runner, or blocker or receiver. Think of a Canadian twelve man version of Joe Gibbs’ offenses. The wingback as a receiver is covered by the fourth defensive back, simply the halfback.
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