Hamilton Tiger-Cats

The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are a professional Canadian football team based in Hamilton, Ontario. Their home games are played at Tim Hortons Field. The team is part of the eastern division of the Canadian Football League. The team was founded in 1869 as the Hamilton Football Club Tigers. In 1950, the team would merge with the Hamilton Wildcats, and the merger adopted the team name of the Tiger-Cats.

Since the 1950 merger, the team has won the Grey Cup championship eight times, most recently in 1999. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats Football Club also recognizes all Grey Cups won by Hamilton-based teams as part of their history, which would bring their win total to 15 (the Hamilton Tigers with five, Hamilton Flying Wildcats with one and Hamilton Alerts also with one). However, the CFL does not recognize these wins under one franchise, rather as the individual franchises that won them. If one includes their historical lineage, Hamilton football clubs won league championships in every decade of the 20th century, a feat matched by only one other North American franchise in professional sports, the Triple-A Minor League Baseball team Rochester Red Wings of the International League. None of these three teams won a championship in the first two decades of the 21st century.

In their first forty years of existence the Tiger-Cats qualified for the playoffs in all but three of those years and won seven Grey Cup championships. They are one of six teams in the modern era to win the Grey Cup at home and were the first to accomplish this when they did it in 1972. However, since 1990, they have missed the playoffs on eleven occasions and have won just one Grey Cup in 1999 (and have the longest Grey Cup drought of both the current East Division teams and in all the CFL). Their lowest moment came when they lost a CFL record 17 games in one season with just one win during their 2003 season. The franchise has started to return to prominence after qualifying for the post-season in eight of the 10 years of the 2010s decade, including appearances in the 101st, 102nd, and 107th Grey Cups.