The Ottawa Redblacks' miserable 2026 season has reached a new low.
Ottawa dropped to 0-15 on the season with a 34-16 defeat to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats on Friday, setting a new CFL record for consecutive losses to begin a season. They broke the old mark set by the 1994 Shreveport Pirates during their inaugural season as part of the league's brief U.S. expansion.
The Redblacks have now lost 21 straight games dating back to last September. It's the second-longest overall streak in Canadian football history; the Ottawa Senators/Rough Riders - which the CFL considers to be the forerunner of the Redblacks franchise - lost 25 in a row over a five-year span from 1928-1932.
It looked like this might finally be Ottawa's night for the first 30 minutes, as the Redblacks took a 16-13 lead into halftime. But Hamilton took over from there, scoring 21 unanswered points in the second half to continue the Redblacks' forgettable campaign.
Ticats All-Star wideout Kenny Lawler caught the game-winning touchdown at the end of the third quarter, and hauled in a second major - his 400th career reception - to extend their lead early in the fourth. Ottawa quarterback McLeod Bethel-Thompson's final attempt to lead a comeback ended when he was strip-sacked by Mitchell Agude, who recovered the fumble for Hamilton.
McLeod Bethel-Thompson has it stripped from him and the Tiger-Cats grab the fumble!#CFL pic.twitter.com/55aL4X53XU
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) October 3, 2026
The Redblacks now have three games left to avoid becoming the first team in modern CFL history (since 1958) to go winless in a single season. The last Canadian football team to post a winless season was the 1949 Hamilton Wildcats, who went 0-12 in their final season of play before merging with the Hamilton Tigers to form today's Tiger-Cats.
It was the Ticats who came the closest to producing a winless season in recent times, when they went 1-17 in 2003.
