National Post (National Edition)
Will CFL fend off another startup football league?
The CFL received an unexpected bit of good news this week, and that news was: Landry Jones. I will admit when the email landed that said Landry Jones was the first player to ever sign with the reincarnated XFL, my first thought was “Oh? I’ve heard of that guy.” It’s a low bar, admittedly, but signing players with at least a dash of NFL pedigree would seem to give the XFL at least a little in the way of early-stage credibility.
And then I took a closer look and changed my mind. I remembered Jones as a former collegiate star and the understudy to Ben Roethlisberger with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Both those things are true. But he is also 30 years old and did not play at all in the NFL last season. Nor will he, evidently, in this coming season.
The Steelers cut him on the eve of last season, and Jacksonville and Oakland have signed him and then released him in the months since. And so, in five NFL seasons, he made five starts. He threw for 1,310 yards, or a good Pat Mahomes month, with eight touchdowns and seven interceptions. The last time he was a regular starter was seven years ago, in Oklahoma, and by the time the XFL debuts next spring he will not have played a game that counted for about two years.
Keep in mind, here, that the XFL made a point of announcing on Thursday: We got Landry
Jones! First player in league history! (Double finger-guns.)
Perhaps all they were hoping for was the same reaction across the football world that I had: hey, I have heard of him. It’s a weird way to build excitement in your fledgling league.
The CFL, of course, is the furthest thing from fledgling. Second-oldest championship trophy in North American pro sports, and all that. As recently as last fall, the prospect of two planned spring football leagues in the United States loomed as some degree of a competitive threat: the wouldbe Alliance of American Football and the reconstituted XFL. Each had wealthy, connected people involved and they were promising base salaries considerably higher than those of the CFL, and a schedule that fit better with players who still harboured thoughts of an NFL career. Play for one of the new leagues in the spring, perform well, and go straight into an NFL camp. The CFL has seen off many such threats over the decades, but if one ever does stick, it would represent something of a crisis for the Canadian league’s talent base. Certain wiseacre columnists — whistles idly, shuffles feet — wondered at the Grey Cup last year if either the AAF or the XFL would be the one to do it.
But the AAF came and went before it even completed a season, with Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon bizarrely arriving to be its saviour and then its executioner in a matter of weeks. Now it is the XFL’s turn. The league went through a series of head-coach announcements already, with most of the names recognizable to football fans: Bob Stoops, June Jones, Marc Trestman and, er, Jim Zorn. But finding coaches was always going to be the easy part, as there are far more of them than there are high-profile professional coaching jobs. Finding players is the greater challenge, and announcing Landry Jones as the marquee first signing only underscores that point. The XFL says it plans to sign seven more “leading” quarterbacks before a draft in October — confusingly, players sign with the league first, and then enter a draft to find out where they will play — and it expects that a good chunk of its talent pool will be filled by those players who are among the final cuts at NFL camps over the next few weeks. But many such players would rather try to hang on and land on a different NFL team, or even its practice squad, before signing up with Vince McMahon’s latest pet project. Jones is the only example because he’s the only guy signed, but he’s not an up-and-comer trying to use the XFL as a springboard to the NFL, he’s someone who likely realized that his NFL days are over and so he will make some money this way. Feel the excitement!
Potential XFL roster-building issues aside, what the AAF experience proved, again, is these ventures are extremely costly. Even with decent early television ratings and games in a few venues that were moderately well-attended, the AAF went through money like poop through a goose. McMahon seems willing to suffer steep losses to see the XFL through the lean years, but that was supposed to be the idea behind Dundon’s AAF intervention, too.
None of this is to say it is all sunshine and rainbows in the CFL. The Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto franchises are all enveloped in various states of crisis, and the new CFL 2.0 positioning as a global aggregator of football talent has not been a rousing success out of the gate, unless you put an awful lot of weight on the fact a fellow from France has made two (2) special-teams tackles for the Edmonton Eskimos.
Postmedia News sstinson@postmedia.com