The opening might be narrow but the CFL puts its best foot forward on Labour Day weekend
It really was a necessary weekend for the Canadian Football League to put its best foot forward.
If the CFL was going to generate significant interest outside of its traditional strongholds before the football and sports landscape gets a lot more cluttered, Labour Day weekend was the time to get it done.
Commissioner Randy Ambrosie can call it an unqualified success. He got impressive crowds in Regina, Hamilton and Calgary, great weather and good performances from the home teams in all three cities, the return of some old stars and the emergence of some new ones, and a higher quality of competition than has sometimes been the case in the past few seasons.
For this weekend, at least, pushed to the side were the chronic attendance issues in Vancouver and Toronto, the state of the two teams in those cities, and the fact that nobody really seems to want to buy the league-owned Montreal Alouettes a month after Ambrosie indicated a sale was at hand.
Instead, it was about the football. You had young Saskatchewan quarterback Cody Fajardo leading his team on a long scoring march at the end of the game to beat first-place Winnipeg. You had the Tiger-Cats asserting themselves as the CFL’s best team, stomping the hapless Argonauts with a second-half surge led by another young quarterback, Dane Evans. Finally, you had the return of the highest-profile player in the league, two-time outstanding player Bo Levi Mitchell, who threw for 263 yards and led the defending Grey Cup champion Stampeders past Edmonton.
This was all good. That said, starting Thursday it all gets much harder as the monstrosity that is the National Football League gets underway in Chicago with the league’s 100th anniversary season. A month from now, the NHL will begin its 2019-20 campaign, which means the CFL teams in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal and Ottawa soon won’t have the stage mostly to themselves.
And, remember, the championship run of the Toronto Raptors, with Jurassic Park parties across the country, overshadowed pretty much everything earlier this year, including the beginning of the CFL season. So the window for three-down football in the Great White North to grab attention, attract eyeballs and generate new fans was smaller than ever this year.
A good Labour Day weekend surely helped. Where this goes from here for Ambrosie’s league, including his ambitious CFL 2.0 plans to internationalize the player pool and hopes of putting an expansion franchise in Atlantic Canada, will take time to assess.
But when the CFL does get to be heard, as it showed this past weekend, it can still make a good case for itself.
Regina, as we all know, is now the league’s epicentre, incredible to those who remember the 1990s when the Riders were the league’s charity case. Or one of them. The emergence of Fajardo as a legitimate starting quarterback is good news for Saskatchewan football fans, and not so good news for the Argos, who once had him on their roster.
This is a league driven by quarterbacks, and when you don’t have one, you’re dead. That’s a part of the reason the Argos are 1-10 after their 38-27 defeat in Hamilton, although Jim Popp’s organization has plenty of other problems aside from whatever talents McLeod Bethel-Thompson may or may not have behind centre.
The Tiger-Cats benefitted from the best professional game of the 25-year-old Evans’ young career. The Texan took over from Jeremiah Masoli earlier this season when Masoli went down with a torn ACL, and on Monday he shredded the Argo defence for 442 passing yards. After throwing two interceptions and fumbling away the ball once in the first half, Evans sparkled in the second half, and at one point threw 19 consecutive completions to help the Cats storm back from a 24-11 halftime deficit.
Like Fajardo, Evans looks like the real deal in Hamilton, and while the Tiger-Cats continue to be a remarkably undisciplined club, they’re 9-2 and all but unchallenged at the moment in the East. It’s Hamilton’s best start since the days of Ron Lancaster and Danny McManus, bringing some positive vibes to the CFL in the key southern Ontario market.
The Argos, pretty much ignored in the GTA these days, put up a decent fight at Tim Hortons Field, both figuratively and literally in a game that included multiple scrums and ejections. Toronto’s marquee player, Derel Walker, a receiver signed by the Argos last winter when Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment couldn’t lure Mitchell away from Calgary, had a productive day catching passes but was really the lone Toronto bright spot.
Still, it was an entertaining game on an entertaining weekend for the CFL. Those of us who have watched and embraced this league for decades would like there to be more weekends just like it.
Unfortunately for the CFL, the challenge isn’t usually what it can produce on the field. It’s whether, with so much else out there to attract the attention of Canadian sports fans, it can get enough folks to take notice.
www.msn.com/en-ca/sports/news/damien-cox-the-opening-might-be-narrow-but-the-cfl-puts-its-best-foot-forward-on-labour-day-weekend/ar-AAGI48i
Yes Walter, people are still watching.
