IT’S A SASKATCHEWAN SHINDIG
Seeking to generate some pre-season hype, the CFL is doing it all in Regina this week
It may be the only time in the history of sport when the B sample doesn’t match the A sample.
For the past two or three years, the control freaks who populate the football ops offices around the Canadian Football League have managed to turn the formerly fan- and media-friendly nine-team circuit into one of the most closed-off in pro sports.
But look at what we have with CFL Week.
What we’re likely to experience with this week’s pilot project is the most fan- and media-friendly event ever. The B sample is going to be unbelievable!
As president of the Football Reporters of Canada, your correspondent was more than familiar with the A sample last season.
The NFL media policy requires dressing rooms open for 45 minutes a day, four days a week, for media to gather material to deliver on multiple platforms to the fans. The CFL was down to zero.
During my term as FRC president, we managed to get the rooms open for one day a week in eight of the nine cities in the league. Edmonton, for decades the media-access capital of the CFL, remained at zero.
What we have this week will be complete culture shock, with the CFL flying in 50 top players for two days of media access. There will be news conferences with all coaches and general managers later in the week. Forty-three members of the media will be in position starting Tuesday morning.
“CFL Week will be extremely beneficial to us,” said TSN vicepresident and executive producer Paul Graham, who went through his own battles on the access front last year.
“I think this is a terrific initiative by the CFL. The league has done a tremendous job of getting all the parties together, basically under one roof, with some innovative ideas. It can only be beneficial to all of us if we are having CFL conversations months from the start of the season, and Regina is the perfect place to do this.
“TSN gets a couple of days, with full access to the star players, to capture action poses, headshots and promotional material. It gives us a great head start to the production and design of the CFL on TSN for 2017. We will also have daily reports on Sportscentre in addition to a strong social media presence. The hope is this becomes an annual event.”
Bev Wake, Postmedia’s senior executive sports producer, agreed.
“This gives us an opportunity to sit down with the stars of the game, away from the field of play, and talk to them in ways we normally can’t,” she said. “This will allow us to tell better stories not only in advance of the season, but once it begins, and that’s good for fans.”
The CFL website has ambitious plans and the press in Saskatchewan will be all over the event. In a way, the CFL has found a new way to do some of the things it used to do.
Once upon a time, there was an event the CFL called the Skywriters Tour. During training camp, sportswriters from throughout the Western Conference used to fly from training camp to training camp, interviewing coaches, general managers and star players. The Skywriters Tour educated everybody about the events of the off-season and created a buzz for the coming season.
Way back when, the league also used to have an all-star game — and a taped skills competition to run during telecasts during the season — where the best players had a chance to hang out and socialize. There also used to be the coach-of-the-year event, held in Edmonton.
The idea this year is to create the same effect by flying anybody who is anybody in the league to one giant festival of Canadian football to create a heaping helping of hype to launch the season.
There’s more involved than two days of interviewing 50 football players and another day of grilling coaches and GMs.
On Wednesday, the Canadian Football Hall of Fame’s 2017 inductees will be introduced at the new Mosaic Stadium, where the announcement will become a far greater occasion than ever before.
There will also be a free fiveday Fan Fest — a family-friendly production with autograph sessions, player Q&As, photo ops, drills and activities. Then there’s the Fan Cave, which will feature football-themed entertainment such as CFL head of officials Glen Johnson’s You Make The Call event, CFL statistician Steve Daniels’ Ultimate CFL Trivia Contest tweet-ups and plenty of beer.
On Thursday, there will be a panel event featuring three generations of CFL quarterbacks — Warren Moon, Anthony Calvillo and Mike Reilly — who will join TSN’s Rod Smith for a discussion sponsored by Athabasca University.
The CFL Combine, involving the league’s top prospects, caps the festivities.
There’s no admission charge for events, other than the $250 VIP Hall of Fame event and the combine sessions, which have already sold out.
“This is all definitely part of commissioner Jeffrey Orridge’s strategy to extend our reach to the fans,” said Christina Litz, the CFL’s new vice-president of content and marketing.
“Our fans are passionate and we’ve heard from fans how they want more engagement with the league. We just weren’t doing enough in the off-season to engage with them to bring great content and great ways for them to get excited about the upcoming season,” she added. “At the same time, we have a lot of things we have to do like the combine and the draft, and last year we created a new event with TSN and Adidas to do a media shoot, which we did in Toronto last year. We brought about 50 players to Toronto … to do a shoot to unveil the new Adidas uniforms and combined it with the TSN-RDS shoot that they’d done at night, going from training camp to training camp, that I don’t think anybody really loved. We did a bit of a media car wash there as well.”
The idea this year was to build on that success.
“We had happy players who loved the fact that they were being treated like the stars that we know that they are,” she said.
“There was just so much opportunity to do more with everybody in one place. Taking those two things, we started to think what more can we do and began to think of bringing this directly to our fans, live and in person as well. In a way it grew to kind of a Grey Cup activation. The thought was, ‘What if we did that and put a few of these things together and added some layers to that?’ When we started talking to fans, it became a no brainer.”
The changes were made, she said, in large part due to feedback from fans.
“They’re coming from not just all over Saskatchewan,” Litz said, “but from all over Canada. We
wanted to make sure it was going to be a really fun experience for them.”
It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that the budget for the event will be well over $1 million, when you consider airfare and hotel rooms for 50 CFL stars, prospects, CFL staff and everybody else involved.
“It’s a substantial investment from our ownership group and it goes to investing in what we’re doing,” Litz said.
Fantastic — but what if the same people won’t stand up to the football ops guys during the season to accomplish the same goal when it doesn’t cost a dime?
Mindboggling.