CFL leery of NFL’s intrusion to Toronto
TORONTO (AP) – Except for a brief and ill-fated bid in the 1990s to expand to the United States – anyone remember the Las Vegas Posse? – the Canadian Football League has peacefully coexisted with the world’s most powerful football league, the NFL.
CFL commissioner Mark Cohon and a smaller but passionate Canadian fan base want to keep it that way.
As the CFL enjoys a resurgence in its 50th year, with TV ratings and attendance up, and its eight franchises on stable financial footing, concerns are being raised what might happen should the NFL make a permanent move into its territory.
So far the NFL is only visiting, with the Buffalo Bills set to play the first of five annual regular-season games in Toronto Sunday when they host the Miami Dolphins. From Bills owner Ralph Wilson’s perspective, the series is meant to embrace fans in Canada’s largest city about a 100-mile drive from Buffalo, while also tapping revenue to secure the Bills’ long-term future in Western New York.
There is a desire on the part of the Toronto-based series sponsors, who offered the Bills about 50 percent more money per game than the team collects in Buffalo, to showcase the fifth-largest market in North America as a city that can host an NFL franchise of its own. There is little doubt it could – Toronto is almost five times larger than Buffalo – but there also is fear an NFL team in Toronto might smother the CFL Argonauts.
That possibility may not play well with Canadians, who love American football, but not at the expense of their own cultural identity.
“If this one-game series helps the finances of the Bills and makes them a stronger team to remain in Buffalo, we’ll support that,” Cohon said. “I think anything beyond that is something that our league and most of our fans and most people in this country are not supportive of.”
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has maintained the Toronto series as an opportunity to keep the Bills viable in Buffalo. Goodell noted that the league’s bigger priority is re-establishing a franchise in Los Angeles. There’s also uncertainty who in Toronto would lead an NFL push after Ted Rogers, the financial driving force behind the Bills series, died this week.
Call the CFL quaint or a minor league; by U.S. standards that’s how it compares to the NFL, where first-round draft picks are guaranteed more money than CFL teams collect annually from the league’s $15 million TV contract.
Yet, that doesn’t discount the league producing such star quarterbacks as Doug Flutie, Jeff Garcia and Warren Moon, or account for the cultural significance the CFL has north of the border. Canadians proudly cherish the game as unique to a nation that’s been playing organized football since before the first Grey Cup championship trophy was awarded to the University of Toronto in 1909.
The CFL is in far better shape than it was a mere five years ago, when both the Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats filed for bankruptcy. Both teams have rebounded under new ownership.
For a nation supposedly fixed on hockey, football is a popular sport in Canada, with CFL studies showing half of its fans support its league and the NFL.