Back to the drawing board
For the Toronto Argonauts, the calendar can be divided into two seasons: football and existential crisis.
Sometimes they overlap. Even as the defending Grey Cup champions were falling apart on the field with remarkable speed this season — the collapse began with a second-game injury to quarterback Ricky Ray and it was a death spiral after that — they were showing the same kind of off-field problems that have become grimly commonplace in these parts.
Attendance sagged, again. The post-Grey Cup bounce never materialized. Even with new ownership and a changed front office in place, with the Argos fully in the MLSE stable, interest in the team cratered to the point where attendance at BMO Field for the final home game of the season wasn’t announced in-house.
And so, while new team president Bill Manning took the first step on Saturday to addressing the team’s performance by dismissing head coach Marc Trestman, there will be no quick-fix solution to make Toronto love the Argonauts again. The 2018 season was instead more evidence that all of the oftstated theories for what has been holding the Argos back pale next to the most important one: not enough people in the CFL’s biggest market care about it.
This is not a novel statement. For years now, there have been a series of explanations for why the Argos struggled to draw fans. One after another, they have been addressed, and the end result is still the same: not enough fans.
The big one was the stadium. When the sale of the Argonauts to Bell Media and Larry Tanenbaum was announced in the spring of 2015, everyone involved said the pending relocation to BMO Field had removed the biggest obstacle to the team’s off-field success.
Even a good crowd of 20,000 fans still left the Rogers Centre more than half-empty, and the atmosphere in that building for the CFL had been lousy for years. And while the new owners were careful to say they knew that an Argos revival would not be as simple as throwing open the doors to the new place, there was still an insistence that CFL football played in a smaller outdoor stadium would again prove popular in Toronto. After all, it had worked in Montreal.
But the Argos have now played in BMO Field for three full seasons, and the revival has absolutely not come to pass. This past season, with attendance dropping to below 11,000, a record low for the Argos for a spring game, the stated average of just over 14,000 fans per game was just ahead of last year’s average of 13,900 and change.
Keep in mind that after the first year in the waterfront stadium, when attendance averaged around 16,000 per game, the team’s front office insisted the smallish crowds were the result of what was a bit of a rush job in moving into the new digs. The schedule wasn’t particularly good, and there were problems with the local Indy-car race screwing up one of the dates, and there were too many weeknight games and also the Toronto Blue Jays were really good that season and they were selling a lot of tickets.
But since then, just about anything that could be done to give the Argos an optimal situation in Toronto has been done. The city hosted the Grey Cup to end the first season at BMO, and it was an overtime thriller that showcased CFL football at its best. For 2017, the franchise was put in the hands of Jim Popp and Trestman, stewards of the recent Alouettes dynasty, and though the team wobbled early, it made the playoffs and then made an improbable run to a Grey Cup title.
For 2018, the team was moved into the even-more-secure hands of MLSE, ending the confusing arrangement where a team owned by Bell and Tanenbaum played in a stadium owned by MLSE, which is owned by Bell, Tanenbaum and Rogers. And over each of the past two seasons, the team has been blessed with a bounty of weekend home dates, the perfect theoretical scenario for stoking fan interest in a football game.
None of it has mattered. Not hosting a Grey Cup, not winning a Grey Cup, not a favourable schedule, not the new owners, not the other new owners.
Before the most recent ownership change, the front office insisted the way to success was in improving the game-day experience of an Argo game: parking lot tailgating, outdoor beer gardens and other such amenities.
These things have been deployed to rousing success in new stadiums in Ottawa and Hamilton. In Toronto, they weren’t enough to reverse the prevailing indifference about the CFL.
I asked commissioner Randy Ambrosie during the summer about the attendance problems at BMO, and his response, paraphrased, was: give it time. He believes that MLSE knows how to build a successful operation, and he believes they are committed to making this work over the long term.
That refrain has been said about the Argos and Toronto for a long time, by successive commissioners. It will get better, they say. Renewed interest in the Argos is always something to be realized at some point in the future.
That future, though, the one where the Argos are a hot ticket? It is not coming easily.