Lean toward Hamilton for 2020 Grey Cup?
When the news dropped that the Hamilton Tiger-Cats were holding a viewing party for the Big Reveal, it felt like a nod-and-awink confirmation that the 2020 Grey Cup is coming to town.
Then the Saskatchewan Roughriders said that they’d be staging three viewing parties.
Touché. Couldn’t even think about a parade before something was raining on it.
But if you want an opinion, even if it’s one based on just an ear to the ground detecting faint hoofbeats, Hamilton will have something to celebrate next Thursday night.
Looking for a little off-season mileage by injecting some drama into an otherwise bureaucratic process, the Canadian Football League said Friday that the winner of the three bids for its 2020 championship game would be announced via live broadcast on several platforms of its media partner TSN, during the dinner hour of Feb. 21.
Montreal has not yet publicly scheduled a viewing party and there were already persistent rumours the Alouettes had fallen out of the running, so it likely comes down to the league’s two smallest, yet most rabidly CFLfaithful, markets.
The Tiger-Cats insist they don’t know who’s getting the gig and their only public acknowledgments Friday were that there will be a TV viewing party on the stadium’s Hall of Fame level and a touch of vanilla about owner Bob Young’s appreciation that his team was being considered.
Commissioner Randy Ambrosie and his CFL board have locked their cards very close to the vest on this one, which might be good for a once-fabulouslyleaky league but is bad for those of us who resist controlled messaging.
The Roughriders entered the bidding process as the well-deserved heavy favourites, with their recent (2013) history of a successful festival, their state-ofthe-art new stadium which can easily accordion to accommodate 40,000 fans, Regina’s wealth of sports-event hosting experience, and the promise of an immediate sellout.
But despite a small stadium requiring the installation of at least 8,000 temporary seats just to get to into the low 30s, the TigerCats have been coming on strong in the latter stages of the race, with Ambrosie going out of his way to stress the uniqueness and creativity of the Tiger-Cat bid.
That bid plays loudly on Hamilton’s soaring status as a festival city and mini-mecca to millennialism, which is very attractive to a CFL that has been up front about needing to accelerate its demographic evolution.
Because of the municipal elections, the missing link and biggest early hole in the Ticat bid had been formal city support, which they received in a somewhat controversial council meeting in mid-January. How much was committed — beyond an estimated $200,000 in staffing and organizational costs — was decided, and remains for now, behind closed doors.
But Ambrosie and the CFL board of governors know how much and, it says here, landing that commitment might have tipped the scales Hamilton’s way, if only slightly.
Plus, a 2020 Cup in Regina would be the third straight one west of Manitoba. The league needs a strong and regular presence in southern Ontario where the most people and corporate money still live, and the CFL’s strongest presence comes via the annual Grey Cup festival. Additionally, by 2020 Hamilton will have played host — this is not a misprint— just once in 48 years, and exactly zero times since 1996. If your library books were this overdue the city would own your house outright.
It’s not known whether the league owners have already voted on the 2020 game.
There have been small whispers recently that Thursday’s announcement might encompass both the 2020 and 2021 Grey Cup games, with the Ticats getting one, the Roughriders the other. But that doesn’t align with the CFL’s stance through this entire bid process that it’s a true and open competition, exclusive to 2020.
But what it would align with is easing this looming problem: two of the league’s most iconic franchises, the ones with the most widely spread diaspora, are marshaling their staunchest fans in anticipation of a favourable result and one group will end up really, and quite visibly, unhappy. TSN will probably employ split-screen coverage of the viewing parties — much like an Olympic bid announcement — and can a league constantly battling for popularity and acceptance afford to tick off one of its solid markets, right on national TV?
The International Olympic Committee might be able to humiliate a city it won’t hear from again for years, but the CFL is present in all of its markets ... every single day. So even if it’s a long-shot, announcing two Grey Cup games has a certain win-win logic to it.
Either way, it’s hard to imagine Hamilton being told next Thursday that it’s got to wait yet another year to start hard-planning a Grey Cup festival. That would not be pretty and the CFL knows it ... or should.