Kirk LaPointe: The Canadian Football League is worth saving

For those who won’t ever read an entire article on the Canadian Football League, here are your Grey Cup Game talking points to make it seem you watched Sunday:

1. Prince Harry showed up to promote the Invictus Games next year in B.C.
2. The pre-game coin toss (a military base medal, to be precise) had to be flipped twice by the CEO of a cryptocurrency sponsor of the game (who likely didn’t sense the coinage irony of the moment).
3. The Jonas Brothers performed at half-time to a crowd primarily composed of parents of the group’s fans.
4. A female streaker stopped play in the fourth quarter (she was not tackled, as her male counterparts are often, but politely and languidly escorted from the field).
5. There is a heartwarming narrative about sport, in which a journeyman jobless only months ago filled in for a star quarterback and earned the Most Valuable Player award in the game.

Oh, you want to know more about the game? OK, brace yourselves. The Toronto Argonauts, employing second-string QB Nick Arbuckle because starter Chad Kelly was felled last week by a gruesome leg injury (trust me, don’t look for the video), significantly upset and routed the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 41-24. Winnipeg has been to the Grey Cup game five times in a row, and this was its third straight loss. A rough count among the 52,056 in attendance at Vancouver’s BC Place stadium would have had about 50 Bomber fans for every one Argo supporter. (A friend notes the new provincial policy against short-term Airbnbs meant gargantuan hotel rates, not particularly friendly for a faraway traveller.)

In full disclosure: I am a season ticket holder of the BC Lions. And it’s straight outta pocket, none of that tax-time, business write-off nonsense. So I am complicit and acknowledge the love, in restrained Canadian style, for our quirky brand of football.

On a 65-yard wide field, centre field being not the 50 but the 55-yard line. Three downs, not four. An extra galoot on either side of the line of scrimmage, separated by one yard that ought to, but does not always, guarantee a first down on second- or third-and-one. An historically different-shaped ball than the one down south. All but the linemen and the quarterback in motion before the snap begins play. A stripe on the ball so it can be seen better. A one-point scoring play when the ball is kicked into the end zone, called a rouge. A rule on punts to permit the returner five yards of space when he catches the ball, which is seldom policed. A kickoff play that still imperils the special teams. Field goal posts appropriately at the goal line so they can occasionally thwart an end-zone pass, and an end-zone that feels like a field itself.

In the CFL, unlike the American National Football League, no half-time lead is safe, no fourth-quarter 20-point lead is secure, no 10-point lead at the three-minute warning is in the bank. That opportunity for drama could even teach the Americans a thing or two about how to send the fans home happy. Come to think of it, it’s a little like pro basketball that way, only without the 37 or so time-outs.

And when I write about the CFL the day after the Grey Cup game, I feel there ought to be an overburdened ashtray to my left, a Canadian Club with soda to my right, and my face into the sports section of the paper as the coffee percolates in the pattern-wallpapered kitchen.

The CFL cannot shake that throwback feel, reminiscent of my print journalism days—prouder of its past than positive about its future, struggling to earn the time of a hyperattentive market, mired in a miserly business model, dependent on the benevolence and patience of its owners.

The 111th Grey Cup was in my home city Vancouver this week. The game, and the days and nights of its fan festival, were conceived by the host BC Lions and their newish owner Amar Doman as a major statement to the rest of the country that a once-beleaguered franchise had at last reconstituted. The industrial magnate had waited two decades to buy the Lions and has done and spent more in three years than seemingly was done in 30 to put bums into seats and restore the team’s local sports identity. Attendance is up and diverse, communities in the province are involved.

Problem was, Doman’s actual team didn’t get the memo. It had a sincerely, strangely mediocre season, despite employing two quarterbacks who were the CFL’s highest-paid players, and they didn’t even make it to the Western final. It lost to the team that lost to the team that lost the Grey Cup. By the time you’re reading this, it may have fired the coach.

Doman is one of a new breed of CFL team owners—communications czar Pierre-Karl Péladeau in Montreal and construction baron Larry Thompson in Edmonton are the other recent additions—who are likely the league’s make-or-break leaders. If they and their counterparts can’t build a new audience for the game, I can’t see the next generation wanting to try.

We will know much more about any existential questions once we are through an impending swirl of activity: its broadcast contract has to be modernised and enlarged when it is redone at the end of next season, it has to fulfill its interminable effort to bring a franchise to Atlantic Canada, and it needs to recruit a new commissioner wise enough to make enough Canadians believe in the league again.

Recent years have not been kind to current commissioner Randy Ambrosie. The league shut down in 2020 and abbreviated its schedule in 2021, with Ambrosie unable to coax around $150 million in COVID funds out of Ottawa when it seemed every other sector could, and the league is still recovering. No surprise, then, that revenues Ambrosie pledged to double when he took the job in 2017 have fallen very, very short of that and made owners very, very short with him. The launch of his cutting-edge statistics system to bring greater fan engagement was a flop. And Ambrosie’s CFL 2.0 strategy to create player and coaching ties in Mexico, Japan, and Germany is proving to be little more than a distraction. Attendance is rebounding, TV ratings are solid, but CFL governors pushed him into premature retirement in 2025.

What I wonder is: who would want this job? Who could not understand the context the CFL finds itself in and run far and fast from any such opportunity?

The fan base is aging out like that of the newspaper and AM radio businesses. School and minor football programs have shrunk as spawning grounds for fans and players. Parents are keeping more and more of their children out of the game for safety’s sake. The league has a disproportionate reliance on gate revenue. Smaller markets are struggling to compete financially. The NFL’s footprint in Canada grows and our best players go there. Near-border NFL franchises market aggressively in Canada. Seven of nine CFL franchises, all but Hamilton and Saskatchewan, have NHL competition in their markets.

Toronto has baseball and basketball, too, and the cruel reality is that the Argonauts are such small fry relative to the Maple Leafs, Blue Jays, and Raptors that many in the city likely don’t realise today their city houses a sports champion—just as many Canadians likely don’t realise their country houses a game still worth saving. Surely this is an annual Canadian party we don’t want to lose. We must have some life in us, eh?

Surely there must be a brave Canadian who wants to be an institutional hero. Hello? Hello?