Return to home dominance fuelling Elks

EDMONTON – Edmonton’s CFL franchise has won 14 Grey Cup championships, and the one constant in those years was domination at home.

Only once in those 14 years did the Elks (then Eskimos) lose more than two home games — they were 6-3-1 in 1978, the first of consecutive championship seasons.

Three years they were unbeaten at home and six seasons they lost only one game. Overall the team is 100-18-1 at home in its Grey Cup years.

Just as their dominance at Commonwealth Stadium has keyed past success, it is their 6-1 home record this year that has propelled the Elks to their first playoff berth since 2019.

Coming off a loss in Toronto last weekend, the Elks are back in the friendly confines of Commonwealth on Saturday when they look to get back to their winning ways against Hamilton Tiger Cats.

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“We love playing here and we’ve tried to establish this being a tough place to play,” quarterback Cody Fajardo said. “With our fans showing up and having 30,000 plus, that makes it a much better atmosphere for us, helps our defence out, gives us energy as an offence.”

Seeing ticket sales increase through the week puts negative thoughts into the mind of visiting teams, said Fajardo.

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“When you see ticket sales … trending in the right direction it makes you think about snap count, it makes you think about different plays that you’ve got to call because you know it’s going to be tough.

“So when things are trending, like ticket sales and we can say the upper deck’s open, that plays a big part in the mind games and the strategy against opposing teams. We’ve got to use that to our advantage.”

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Against Hamilton, Fajardo said the Elks, now aiming to secure a home playoff date, will need any advantage they can get.

“It’s a Hamilton team that’s going to scratch, claw, fight because they’re still in (the playoff picture). Their defence has kept them in a lot of games. Offensively, we’re going to have our hands full.”

Head coach Mark Kilam has been promoting the slogan Concrete Castle of the North for Commonwealth.

“We want to make this a hard place to play and I think we take pride in that,” Kilam said.

This year’s success is a dramatic contrast to the team’s home-field performance through most of this decade. There was a time, after the team name was changed to the Elks in 2021, that the concrete structure was a disaster for the home team.

The Elks set a record of 22 consecutive home losses over four years that finally ended on Aug. 27, 2023. The renamed team hadn’t had a winning season in Commonwealth until this year.

Fajardo remembers the days he would come into Edmonton as a member of the Saskatchewan Roughriders (2019-2022) and then the Montreal Alouettes (2023-24).

“You know, there’s a couple of times you would just circle it on your calendar and be like, yep, that’s a win,” he said.

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“We did everything we could to change that culture, change that mindset so that when you now see the Elks on your schedule, you know it’s going to be a physical game, it’s going to a four-quarter game. We’ve worked tremendously hard from the top of the organization down to the players to make this place extremely hard (for visiting teams).”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2026.