Strange summer
Esks, league battle empty seats
The crowd count is expected to push 30,000 Thursday evening at Commonwealth Stadium, which at least would be an improvement and back to something resembling normal numbers.
It’s been a strange summer.
The CFL gave the Edmonton Eskimos two home games during what turned out to be brutal weather in June. Those two depressing dates were followed by three away games and a bye weekend before the next home game. And that game is against the 0-5 Toronto Argos during K-days after the team played a stinker Saturday in Montreal.
But recent measures to bring people back to Commonwealth Stadium, where the Eskimos led the league in attendance for most of the 41 seasons since it was built, may be having an impact.
“Right now we’re trending for between 27,000 and 30,000,” said acting president and CEO Mandy Johnson, who has been working with the board of governors to find local solutions to what appears to be a leaguewide problem this season.
To reboot the business, the Eskimos have created a $22 ticket with $5.25 beer and $2.25 hotdogs and a summer-long promotion that sees kids 17 and under getting in free.
There are a lot of reasons for the leaguewide drop in attendance, one of which, I believe, was the unprecedented player turnover and the loss of familiar faces and names fans had developed emotional attachments to over the years.
In Edmonton, that included quarterback Mike Reilly, now in B.C., and receiver Derel Walker, who is back in town with the Toronto Argonauts Thursday. Reilly and Walker have one win to show for their season, so there may be a curse involved.
Moving the schedule up to provide better weather during playoffs and the Grey Cup hasn’t resulted in fans getting dialed into the season earlier.
How much of it is national, regional or local is open to debate.
But the numbers don’t lie.
The Toronto Argos, the last time they had a home game, had a crowd count so small they were too embarrassed to announce an attendance figure.
It remains the only game in the CFL this season without a crowd count listed on the league website and it’s a sorry story of paid ticket totals almost everywhere to this point.
Attendance figures through the first six weeks:
B.C.: 18,058, 17,026
Calgary: 26,301, 25,130, 23,355
Edmonton: 25,263, 24,016
Saskatchewan: 30,121, 29,147, 31,602
Winnipeg: 25,336, 24,187, 25,350
Toronto: 16,734, Not listed
Hamilton: 22,287, 22,407, 22,407, 22,921
Ottawa: 23,453, 20,426, 21,536
Montreal: 18,673, 16,137
In Edmonton, there definitely has been the economy and especially a weather factor involved.
“With the first two games, weather was just a huge factor. The week leading up to both game days resulted in no pregame ticket sales at all. For the second game we had that monsoon with 100 millimetres of rain leading up to the game,” Johnson said.
There were far fewer there than announced, as there were a number of empty season ticket holder seats.
That appeared to be the same situation with last weekend’s game between Calgary and the Argos — although it was a post-stampede date when a significant number of visitors traditionally head out of town.
In Alberta, with the pipeline problem and other political issues, there’s no double the economy has had an impact.
“The $22 ticket, for sure, was trying to hit that. We heard from people who felt that our games may not be affordable,” Johnson said.
The Eskimos are a frustrating organization in that they can produce the most ballistic Grey Cup hosting in history in November and go back to being almost dysfunctional by May.
Despite not having a president or CEO to replace the departed Len Rhodes, the Eskimos decided to find a fix for the tickets situation before the new person was hired. The employees and the board have been working together to make management decisions.
“Until the new president and CEO steps in and puts his branding and visioning on it, the executive management team has been working closely with our board members,” said Johnson.
“We’ve been looking at doing something like this for a while (ticket promotions), but to be honest we were looking at 2020. After the attendance the first two games, we asked ourselves, ‘Why wait for 2020 to pull the trigger?’ It was really 2020 planning we decided to pull forward to this year.”