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sbrunt@globeandmail.com

Gather 'round all ye learned Canadian football prognosticators. It is time to earn your keep.

The 2009 regular season enters its 19th and final week, and after that it's a mad rush to the Grey Cup in Calgary. Normally by this stage, those who break down games using statistical analysis or historical tendencies or pure sophistry can at least pretend to have a pretty good idea of what is about to take place.

They are wrong occasionally, which is the unscripted glory of sport, but normally that involves what Leo Cahill once memorably referred to as "an act of God."

This year, this remarkable year, it may in fact take divine intervention to get it all right.

Begin with a couple of discussion points:

There has never been a more tightly-bunched seven-team field at this late stage of a CFL season. Every one of the teams, if things go right, if they catch just the right amount of wind in their sails, could go on to win a championship. Yet one of them is not even going to make the playoffs.

And the single team absent from that group - the remarkable-in-their-own-way Toronto Argonauts - may well be the worst offensive team in the history of the league. That assertion comes with no firm statistical backing, just the experience of a middle-aged lifetime watching the game, and taking into account that it is far more wide open now than it was once upon a time.

Normally, even bad CFL teams somehow manage to score a few points, but these guys defy all conventional wisdom. Plus, they are if anything worse now than they were early in the football year, testament to the failure of both the personnel and coaching sides of the organization. There are plenty of fun facts that can be attached to the 2009 Argonauts, but here's a favourite: Since they traded away Arland Bruce III in July, the Argos have won precisely one game, an overtime triumph over a Hamilton Tiger-Cats team that seemed to be suffering from a collective hangover.

"I'm not sure he makes our offence better," Argos coach Bart Andrus said as Bruce made his exit, one of those quotes that they'll engrave on your professional tombstone.But enough of them - they'll have one last go against the Montreal Alouettes, and then be consigned to (bad) memory.

It's the rest that will make the final month of football extremely interesting.

Perhaps it's not entirely fair to lump the Alouettes in with the larger group. They did, after all, wrap up the East early, and yesterday they seemed to shake off their late season staleness, thumping the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at Molson Stadium, where they haven't lost all year long.

Still, there were signs of vulnerability in October, especially on defence, and whether it's Hamilton, who played them tough the last time they met, whether it's the Bombers who beat them a week ago on one of Michael Bishop's very good days, whether it's a West crossover team, it's certainly not inconceivable that they could come up short in the East final at the Olympic Stadium - not to mention in what for the Als is the always-problematic Grey Cup game itself.

Everyone else, as the weekend's results affirmed, can beat everyone else. The Ticats dominated the Saskatchewan Roughriders on both sides of the ball Saturday afternoon, their most impressive win of the season, though a Prairie flu bug may have aided their cause. The Calgary Stampeders and B.C. Lions were neck and neck on Saturday night, with precious little to choose between them, and the Lions started Casey Printers, in theory their fourth-string quarterback. The Edmonton Eskimos handled the Argos easily Friday, and may well be the West's weak link, but Ricky Ray on any given day still can summon up the magic.

Unknown right now with only one week to go are the four semi-final participants, the first place team in the West, and of course the one unfortunate (almost certainly B.C., Edmonton or Winnipeg - it would take an Esks-Lions tie, and a loss to the Bombers to keep the Ticats out) who will join the Argos in an early off-season.

That's a whole lot to be settled in a single weekend of football. Go ahead and make your picks. But if you're confident, you're also pretending.