Two weeks into the U SPORTS football season, the new Presto Sports statistics system is running more smoothly than it did on opening weekend — but not smoothly enough for fans trying to follow games in real time.
The season’s opening weekend highlighted just how much the new system still has to prove. Both games on Friday night were not displaying scores properly, while on Saturday, McMaster–York's box score left fans entirely in the dark for days after the game.
U SPORTS spokesperson John Bower said after opening weekend, “five of the seven games [on Aug. 23] the stats went well. The two early games… Presto can’t quite explain it. They’re doing a lot of debugging. Right now they’re trying to find out exactly what happened."
Bower says that they have been testing the new system for six months, but that going into a live environment was a much different animal. An error was spotted before the two games on the first Friday of the season, but the software was unable to update in time for kickoff, rendering live stats from those games almost a write-off.
Bower also pointed to one of the challenges of cloud‑based systems: “If something goes wrong on one part, you have to kind of wait until everybody is done [on the server] before we can do it. And Presto Sports isn't just U SPORTS; it’s also NCAA teams, it’s NJCAA. So we have to wait until the 7 p.m. Pacific Time games and even sometimes later, because there’s games in Hawaii or Alaska.”
The most glaring Week 1 problems have mostly disappeared. Still, live scoring remains sluggish, often trailing several plays behind the action with incorrect entries. Post-game rewrites, while necessary, only add to the confusion.
U SPORTS credits McGill kicker Mario Della Fraine with a 62-yard field goal against Laval on Saturday. If true, it would have set a U SPORTS record. Instead, the attempt was from 42 yards, according to the Redbirds and a local beat reporter’s post on Twitter.
Ironically, that record isn't even available online. The link to the U SPORTS football record book reads "That page is not currently set to be published."
Part of the reason for the switch lies in what U SPORTS was leaving behind. For years, the league relied on a DOS‑based system called Stat Crew, which required old, specialized computers and was entirely key‑command driven. The software was also no longer being updated by its publishers.
As Bower explained, there “some schools would just share their stats laptops” if there were issues leading up to games, as replacements were hard to find.
The old system also left little room for flexibility or modern features. The new Presto platform, with its cloud‑based back end and touch‑screen or mouse options, promised to modernize game tracking — even if the early rollout has been bumpier than hoped.
The main challenges of that rollout comes from the fact that Canadian football has unique rules that don’t exist in American football.
The new Presto system has been adapted for Canadian play — a process that Bower described as “126 different rules, or configurations, that had to be programmed.” That translation isn’t always perfect, which can contribute to the lag and stat anomalies.
Even professional leagues have their struggles with the switch. The Canadian Football League, for example, uses a different system by Genius, which faced its own rollout challenges in 2023, some of which continue even to this day.
Bower notes that Presto was selected in part because it allowed U SPORTS to customize the system for Canadian football without incurring the steep licensing fees that a system like Genius would have demanded.
Bower acknowledged after Week 1 that the transition wouldn’t be seamless.
“We’ve been testing this system for months," said Bower, "but moving from a test environment to live games always brings new challenges.”
Bower noted that a full rewatch and restat of every game is done by Monday or Tuesday of each week. That process ensures the historical record is accurate — but does little for fans trying to follow a game on Saturday afternoon.
In the meantime, many fans, the ones not deterred by the barriers to entry, have turned to stopgaps.
Some lean on social media posts from reporters, others follow along in group chats, and community updates — like OB.’s own Game Chat function — often end up delivering the 411 on key plays before they appear on the official scoreboard.
It’s an ironic twist: the new system was meant to modernize the way U SPORTS games are tracked, yet the clearest picture still comes from a patchwork of workarounds. Until the live box score catches up days, fans are left refreshing the box score, hoping their kicker's record-breaking kick actually exists in real life.