2013 CFL season

The 2013 CFL season will be the 60th season of modern Canadian professional football. Officially, it is the 56th season of the league. Regina is scheduled to host the 101st Grey Cup on November 24. The pre-season will begin on June 12, 2013 and the regular season will begin on June 27, 2013.

Salary Cap
According to the new collective bargaining agreement, the 2013 salary cap will be set at $4,400,000. As per the agreement, the cap is fixed and will not vary with league revenue performance. The minimum team salary will be set at $4,000,000 with individual minimum salaries set at $45,000.

Season schedule
The 2013 season schedule was released on March 5, 2013, with the regular season opening on June 27 at the new Investors Group Field in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This will be the first time Winnipeg has opened the regular season since 1998 and it will be the first time that there will be a brand new stadium in the CFL since Toronto's SkyDome opened in 1989. For the second time in three years, the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats will not play in their Labour Day Classic matchup, due to scheduling conflicts for both teams. Following the previous year's experiment, the league is not only having all division matchups in the last week, but for the final four weeks in total, leading to what they hope will be a tight playoff race. There will be 15 double headers this year, with one on a Thursday, three on Fridays, nine on Saturdays, one on a Sunday, and one (the traditional Thanksgiving contests) on a Monday.

Bye weeks
For the second consecutive year, the teams' bye weeks will occur in the sixth and seventh weeks of the season, earlier than the usual eighth and ninth week setup that has been in place since 2007. These begin over the August Civic Holiday, suggesting that this was done to accommodate for fans' vacation plans.

Stadium changes
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats will take up residence at Alumni Stadium in Guelph for the 2013 season, with the exception of Touchdown Atlantic (see below). The team's previous venue, Ivor Wynne Stadium, was demolished during the offseason, and its replacement, New Hamilton Stadium, will not be ready until at least 2014. Because Alumni Stadium is booked for Labour Day in 2013, the Tiger-Cats will not host the Labour Day Classic and will instead travel to Vancouver to face the BC Lions that weekend. Because Ontario University Athletics also has a tradition of playing football games on Labour Day, finding a suitable venue within Southern Ontario would have been impossible. The Toronto at Hamilton matchup will instead be played as the nightcap in the 2013 Thanksgiving Day Classic.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers will finally take residence at the new Investors Group Field. The stadium was supposed to have been readied last season, but construction delays pushed back the opening to this season. The Toronto Argonauts will host the Montreal Alouettes at the University of Toronto's Varsity Stadium for their preseason game. It will be the first time that the Argonauts will play at Varsity Stadium in 55 years.

Return of Touchdown Atlantic
After a one-year hiatus in 2012, Touchdown Atlantic will return for the 2013 season with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats hosting the Montreal Alouettes on September 21, 2013. This will be the third regular season instalment of the game and the second to feature the Tiger-Cats. This will be the first appearance for the Alouettes and it will also be the first matchup to feature division opponents.

Media
On March 21, 2013, the CFL announced it had renewed its exclusive contract with TSN to televise all CFL games through 2018; the contract includes the national radio rights to the Grey Cup, which will air on TSN Radio and The Team. The contract had originally been set to expire at the end of the 2013 season.

As with the previous contract, the league will have no games broadcast on terrestrial television, prolonging an absence dating to 2007 and making it the largest league in North America without over-the-air television broadcasts.

No deal has been reached, as of March 2013, for United States broadcast rights, which had rested with NBC Sports Network for the second half of the 2012 season.

Rule Changes
On April 10 2013 the CFL Board of Governors approved 2 new rules. The first stated that coaches would be allowed to challenge the result of a field goal attempt or extra point attempt. The second rule gives coaches flexibility on when they can use their timeouts. Coaches can now use both of their time outs at any point during regulation time of a game, as long as they don’t use more than one after the three minute warning has been sounded in the second half of the game. In the past coaches were only allowed to use one time out per half.

Coaching Changes
Immediately following the close of the 2012 CFL season it seemed probable that there would be no head coaching changes in the off-season. However, after a disappointing 6-12 regular season the Hamilton Tiger-Cats fired George Cortez. The expectations on the Ticats were very high after the off-season acquisitions of Henry Burris and Andy Fantuz which Cortez failed to live up to. The Tiger-Cats replaced Cortez with Kent Austin. Austin, who won the 95th Grey Cup with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, had been the offensive coordinator at the University of Mississippi and the head coach of Cornell University for 3 years each. In mid-January, 2013, the Montreal Alouettes lost their head coach Marc Trestman to the Chicago Bears of the NFL. Trestman won two Grey Cups in five seasons as the head coach of the Alouettes from 2008 to 2012. On February 19 the Alouettes announced that Dan Hawkins would be the new head coach. Hawkins had been the head coach of Willamette University, Boise State and University of Colorado from 1993 to 2010.

Structure
Teams play eighteen regular season games, playing two of the three divisional opponents three times, the other four times, and teams from the opposing division twice. Teams are awarded two points for a win and one point for a tie. The top three teams in each division qualify for the playoffs, with the first place team gaining a bye to the divisional finals. A fourth place team in one division may qualify ahead of the third place team in the other division (the "Crossover"), if they earn more points in the season.

If two or more teams in the same division are equal in points, the following tiebreakers apply:


 * a) Most wins in all games
 * b) Head to head winning percentage (matches won divided by all matches played)
 * c) Head to head points difference
 * d) Head to head points ratio
 * e–g) Tiebreakers b–d applied sequentially to all divisional games
 * h–i) Tiebreakers c–d applied sequentially to all league games
 * j) Coin toss

Notes:


 * 1. If two clubs remain tied after other club(s) are eliminated during any step, tie breakers reverts to step a).
 * 2. Tiebreakers do not apply to the Crossover. To cross over a team must have more points than the third place team.

Standings
Note: GP = Games Played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, PF = Points For, PA = Points Against, Pts = Points

''Teams in bold are in playoff positions. X – clinched playoff berth Y – clinched first place and bye to division final