The end of Week 7 in the CFL: Changes must be made in Winnipeg, Saskatchewan no longer undefeated and a great running game means big wins.

This week home teams split with visiting teams, the Saskatchewan Roughriders finally lost and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are so bad, it's now time for a complete overhaul — at the top, not the bottom.

Because there are no crossover games again until Labour Day Weekend, the West continues to dominate the East, 10-2. In terms of home teams, however, it was a split this week. Hamilton and B.C. won at home, Saskatchewan lost and Winnipeg got its collective butt handed to it. The season total is now 17-11 in favour of home teams (17-7 if you remove the West's victories in Eastern buildings).

Now to the trends. Hamilton is not as bad as we think, but Toronto could be as bad as we thought. At 36, Anthony Calvillo is the best quarterback in the CFL. No team will go 18-0, but you have to give that banged-up Roughriders side some credit (Five starters have broken legs for gawd's sake!). They don't quit and they are very well coached. And finally, with all the injuries in Regina, it's very likely the West will not be settled until the final week of the season. 

Let's look a little more closely at what we saw in Week 7…

1. Call it the Curse of Troy Westwood. The bad karma in Winnipeg is wafting through a stadium that just might be in the final months of its existence. From the day Doug Berry humiliated Troy Westwood in public, the Bombers' karma has been lost. So, too, has Barry's locker room — despite what the players like to tell the local papers. When Berry went public in order to make Westwood look like a fool and cut him at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, the gods of football looked down on Berry and said, "Enough already!." Berry's hand-picked successor to Westwood, young Alexis Serna is not very good, but putting him in that situation wasn't fair either (even Westwood conceded the kid was a good kicker, but Westwood should have been kept around to punt). Sadly, Berry's constant berating (OK, swearing at on national TV) of the kid has made him worse. Serna is now 14-for-22 (63 per cent) in field goals and is dead last in punting at 32 yards net (the first Bomber in 35 years to be last in punting). It's sad, but on Friday night, you could see the rest of the Bombers hang their heads every time he missed a  field goal. Meanwhile, it doesn't help that the offence is a joke. If you don't run the football in the CFL, you can't win and the coach's pal, Kit Cartwright, won't run the football. In Winnipeg, it's time to make substantive changes or this team has no chance. Amazingly, even at 1-6, this team still has a chance if those substantive changes are made now.

2. Not to belabour the Winnipeg issue, but It would also help if the Bombers hired Mike McCarthy (whom the National Post reports is selling cars in Hamilton) to assist GM Brendan Taman. His expertise is more important to the future of this team than an airlift of expensive NFL cuts. Mike McCarthy is the best unemployed CFL GM in the country. Since the Ticats gassed him, they've been pretty lousy. 

3. You have to love what Marc Trestman, with no CFL experience, has done with the Montreal Alouettes. The Als are 4-3 and in first place in the East. However, one thing is troubling. All four of their wins have come against Winnipeg and Hamilton. The Als have beaten 2-5 Hamilton 33-10 and 40-33 and have beaten 1-6 Winnipeg 38-24 and 39-11. The Als have lost 23-19 at home to Calgary, 41-33 in Saskatchewan and 36-34 in B.C. the first-place Als are the statistical reason why four teams from the West and only two teams from the East will make the playoffs.

4. Although Anthony Calvillo has been damn good, it's pretty tough to think of anyone other than Saskatchewan's Wes Cates as the CFL's most outstanding player. In seven weeks — the seven weeks in which the Roughriders have gone 6-1 with three different starting quarterbacks — Cates has carried 110 times for 652 yards and seven touchdowns (tops in the CFL). He's caught 24 passes for 274 yards and another touchdown. And he's second in the league in total yards from scrimmage (behind Montreal's Avon Cobourne) with 924. He — along with Cobourne, and Calgary's Joffrey Reynolds — is proof that if you get the ball to your No. 1 runningback on a regular basis, you will win more often than you lose.

5. Need proof that the CFL's offences woke up after a wonky Week 1? How 'bout this? Late Friday night, the 28-27 first-half Lions advantage over Edmonton was the highest halftime score in any Lions game since 1994. This week, the CFL office in Toronto proudly released the following numbers: Heading into Week 7, touchdowns were up 19.2 per cent from the end of Week 6 in 2007; overall scoring was up 9.8 per cent (Whatever that means?)  and total penalties are down from 542 last year to 425 this year. Now, if the league can just make challenges move faster and then find a way cut out all the four-minute commercial breaks on TSN, this game would be perfect.