OTTAWA — Those of us on the Ottawa football beat in the late 1980s will never forget ‘Super Season ‘88.’
The PR brand was meant to highlight a special CFL campaign in Ottawa — the Rough Riders were hosting the Grey Cup that fall and every host team wants to do its best to get in the championship game, or die trying.
Thereafter, ‘Super Season ‘88’ has held an almost cultish connotation to the reporters who were there every day of that remarkable year. The Riders finished with a 2-16 record, one of the worst in CFL history.
Bruce Garrioch (Ottawa Sun), Marc Brassard (Le Droit) and I (Ottawa Citizen) covered every game, home and away. The mere mention of “Super Season” and its assorted calamities gets us laughing, although some moments were far from humorous at the time.
When the final game ended — a 45-11 rout in Saskatchewan — we flew home on a team charter and most of the players were well into their cups while we pounded out our latest accounts of an historically bad Rough Rider season. From a seat behind us, a hulking offensive lineman, half in the bag, peered over our shoulders to read our poisonous ledes and threatened to grab our laptops and throw them off the plane.
There are nervous flying moments due to turbulence and then there is the fear of being locked in a plane with a couple dozen angry, imbibing football players.
We survived. And we figured Super Season would survive in franchise annals, in a loveable manner, as the “worst ever” Ottawa football season, although the early 1930s must have been depressing. In the Depression, appropriately.
From 1929 — the year of the stock-market crash — through 1932, the old Riders ran off four straight 0-6-0 seasons. Because they also dropped the final game of 1928 (the team actually was known as the Senators at the start of the streak through 1930), Ottawa suffered a still-standing record of 25 consecutive losses at the top level of Canadian football.
Guess what? Today’s Ottawa Redblacks are in hot pursuit!
Sitting at 0-16 with two games remaining, Ottawa’s RBs would kill to have those two wins recorded by the old ‘88 Riders, decisive victories over Winnipeg, on the road, and against Calgary at Lansdowne.
Because the Redblacks’ most recent victory came on Sept 5, 2025, the current losing streak is actually 22 games, counting the six losses to conclude 2025. (I have a son born on Sept. 6. He jokes that the last time Ottawa won a football game, he was 27. Today he’s 29).
Rather remarkably, as my Sportsnet colleague Mike Koreen noted in a recent story, Redblacks first-year head coach Ryan Dinwiddie lost his last five games while coaching the Toronto Argonauts, so his personal losing streak is at 21 games and counting.
RBs=22 straight defeats.
Dinwiddie=21 straight.
Dinwiddie meets Redblacks — an eerie confluence of losing.
If only it were just one bad season. Or two.
Since the start of the 2019 campaign, the Redblacks have run up a combined record of 27-92-1, with one winning season over the past seven campaigns. Year by year: 3-15-0, then a season cancelled by the pandemic, 3-11-0, 4-14-0, 4-14-0, 9-8-1, 4-14-0 and this year's 0-16-0 to date.
The Redblacks play host to the Argos on Friday before ending their season in Hamilton on Oct. 24. Will they continue their dance with calamitous history or shock us with a victory?
Who can stand the suspense.
•••
To make some sense of the relentless depravity I called up James “Duke” Ellingson, always one of the more honest and thoughtful football voices in Ottawa. A former Rough Riders receiver, Ellingson continues to work on Redblacks pre-and-post game shows of the CFL radio broadcasts on TSN1200.
Ellingson admits he “didn’t think it would be possible” for a CFL team to be this bad.
Consider the odds against it. With its limited talent pool, short-term contracts and rapid turnover, CFL teams tend to ebb and flow with good years and off ones, but a run of six nightmare seasons over seven years?
That’s almost worth applauding. Ottawa has achieved the near-impossible.
In a quarterback-driven league, we can start there.
The Redblacks haven’t won consistently since they had Trevor Harris and Henry Burris at the helm, and that is going back pre-pandemic.
I liked the move to bring in Jeremiah Masoli in 2022 — who didn’t appreciate his gutsy play with the Tiger-Cats? — but he suffered major injuries over his first two Ottawa seasons and never really got established here.
Since then it’s been a Nick Arbuckle here, a Dru Brown there and a Jake Maier here.
Ellingson likes to say about the Redblacks:
“They start every game with the second-best quarterback on the field.”
Rookie Bryson Barnes is scheduled to make his CFL starting debut Friday vs Toronto. May God help him.
If only the QBs were the sole issue. The Redbacks can’t defend, don’t run the ball particularly well and don’t seem able to match personnel with other teams, despite attempts to bring in some name players from other organizations.
One of the most damning comments all year came from the mouth of veteran quarterback McLeod Bethel-Thompson, who said after the most recent loss in Vancouver last week that his team had “no plan” for the second half.
No plan? Hullooo coaches? Isn’t that Football 101, adjusting at halftime?
And that happened to be the second straight game after which Bethel-Thompson made a remark about lack of adjustments at the half. Talk about a shot across the bow. Message delivered.
My sense is that the ship leaks from all quarters, fore and aft. From ownership to president (resigned this summer) to VP of football operations (fired this summer) to the current GM and head coach Dinwiddie.
Dinwiddie got the dual role because it was the only way to lure him from Toronto, where he was still under contract. There are no lateral moves allowed in a situation like that, but by making him GM and coach, Ottawa got the guy who was supposed to spark the turnaround.
As Maxwell Smart used to say, “missed it by that much.”
Several weeks ago, veteran CFL mind Jim Popp was brought in as an adviser, but this team is no short-term fix, regardless of a guy’s resume. Fans might believe in Popp as a full time GM. And maybe, maybe, Dinwiddie with another shot coaching, considering he was just signed.
Generally speaking, the organization needs a massive reboot, a new general manager, coaching overhaul, scouts, with an ability to find quality U.S. tackles, Canadian talent (never a deeper pool, Ellingson says) and a quarterback to build around.
That won’t be easy given how many veteran CFL quarterbacks are in the twilight hours of fine careers, the likes of Harris, Bo Levi Mitchell, Zach Collaros and Cody Fajardo.
Ottawa needs to find a good young starter and build around him. Where’s the next Nathan Rourke? Is it Barnes? He’s thrown into a 10-alarm blaze this week.
This turnaround is going to take time and fans will respond when they see some progress and legitimate change. Hiring Ellingson in some capacity would be a start. He knows the league and is highly respected by Ottawa fans.
Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG) executive chairman Roger Greenberg said in a radio interview that the franchise is “not going anywhere,” and vowed that ownership remains committed. I should hope so. The city of Ottawa is on the hook for millions invested in a Lansdowne 2.0 project that wasn’t popular from the start and could use a positive vibe rather than a stench from its main tenant.
OSEG also owns the OHL's Ottawa 67’s, a far more successful, if lower profile, entity at TD Place.
“I was born and raised here,” Greenberg said. “This is where my family made its fortune.”
Ownership needs to make a stronger statement post-season with a go-forward plan fans can buy into. As someone who takes the temperature of fans after each one of these defeats, Ellingson says the mood has shifted from anger, to apathy, to frustration-and, finally, to a feeling of embarrassment.
Crowds are waning to the point that the Redblacks are in danger of being outdrawn by a semi-pro baseball team in town, the Frontier League champion Titans. No joke. The Titans had multiple sellouts this season while the Redblacks were in the mid-teens last game (based on sales, not bums in seats), a far cry from the sellouts when the franchise began as an expansion team in 2014.
A year later, the Redblacks were in the Grey Cup game. They won the CFL championship in 2016 and returned as a Cup finalist in 2018.
Miracles do happen.
“We’re going to fix this, we’re going to figure out how to create a winning team here,” Greenberg said.
Then show fans the blueprint, please.
Two games to go. Two chances to match the 1988 Rough Riders, who set the bar tantalizingly low.
No CFL team has ever posted a record of 0-18. Ottawa has done most of the heavy lifting to accomplish what was thought to be impossible.
