Red-hot Ticats looking to win seven in a row for just the fourth time in franchise history

So, just how rare is the seventh straight win that the Hamilton Tiger-Cats—now 6-2 and a game ahead of the rest of the CFL East—will be chasing in Thursday night’s Wall of Fame game against the retribution-seeking BC Lions?

Very rare. As in fingers-on-one-hand, rare.

Only three times before have the Tiger-Cats mounted seven consecutive victories in the same regular season.

To place that in a larger context, this is the 75th season the Ticats have played since the old Tigers and Wildcats merged to begin the franchise’s “modern era” in 1950.

The club record for single-season consecutive wins is the 10 to close out the 1972 season under legendary rookie QB Chuck Ealey, which led to the last time a Ticat team won a Grey Cup held in Hamilton.

The next-best regular-season skein is seven in a row, established twice within three years during the Ticats’ first golden era, with similar personnel in those two big seasons. They won the first seven of the 1961 season, and the last seven in 1963.

And when the Ticats rallied to win with another late-game Bo Levi Mitchell march to win their sixth in a row Saturday night, 28-24 in Edmonton. It was just the eighth time—again, in 75 playing seasons (2020 was cancelled during the pandemic)—the Cats have won a half dozen or more in a row.

That exclusive six-or-more club includes the aforementioned trio, this hot run, and six-game Cat streaks in 1964, 1967 and 1998, plus the fluorescent 2019 season when the Cats won six in a row to end the season and establish the franchise’s all-time-best regular season mark of 15-3.

These are regular-season streaks: the 2019 Cats also won their first postseason games to make it seven in a row that year; and the 1963 team won its first playoff game (lost the second) to go eight in a row over regular and postseason play.

And here’s another statistic that should give Ticat Nation a lot of hope and even more faith than they’ve already been developing in the current team, whose enormous self-belief is helping them find ways to come out on top, even when they seem beaten or aren’t playing their best all-around game.

In every one of the previous seven times the Cats have won at least seven regular-season games in the same year, they’ve finished first in the East and gone to the Grey Cup. They won three of those Cups (’63, ’67, ’72).

In those seven seasons, the Cats have at least 10 wins, a total they’ve reached only 10 times in franchise history (although earlier seasons were shorter, preceding the introduction of the 18-game schedule 39 years ago).

The Tiger-Cats are still some distance from the CFL’s single-season win streak record of 14 set by Calgary in 2016, when Hamilton’s current quarterback, Bo Levi Mitchell, was at the Stamps’ helm. He also directed an 11-gamer in 2017. The 1948 Stamps and 2001 Blue Bombers ran off a dozen in a row.

But the Ticats aren’t thinking that far ahead. Staying in the moment has been a central theme to the current streak, and if they can extend it to seven on Thursday night, they’ll have already equalled last year’s win total.

At exactly the halfway point of the season.