National Post (National Edition)
CFL `optimistic about playing football in 2021'
It wasn’t a touchdown, but Randy Ambrosie has moved the chains. “Just this morning I shared with my team that as soon as I see that we’ve got sign-off from all of our stakeholders, we’re going to publish a schedule very, very soon,” the Canadian Football League commissioner told an online fan town hall on Monday.
It’s going to be a full, 81-game regular-season schedule, followed by playoffs and a Grey Cup game in Hamilton. The league is hoping there will be fans in all nine stadiums to watch those games all season long, though nobody can state that as a fact today, especially given the rising COVID-19 numbers all across Canada.
“We think it’s important to put a stake in the ground,” Ambrosie said in a subsequent interview with Postmedia. “We want to make sure our fans know that we’re optimistic about playing football in 2021.”
During the town hall and in the interview, Ambrosie cited recent vaccine announcements from pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna as reason to think positively about a return to normal in the spring and summer of 2021, a proposition that would include a return to gridiron football in Canada.
“It’s a bit of a gamechanging moment because it allows us to think more specifically,” he said. “Rather than planning multiple scenarios, I think we will in the days ahead have conversations with public health officials and get their take on the vaccine news and how it’s likely to affect the timelines for returning to more normal operations. That’s what we needed, a bit of an anchor. It just so happens on the launch of Grey Cup Unite, today is a day for some optimism.”
Of course, there is still a chance the lingering effects of the pandemic could force the CFL out of its comfort zones. It could still be that the league has to revert to the single-city, short-schedule, bubble concept they planned to employ in Winnipeg earlier this year, had the 2020 season gone ahead.
That doomed campaign died rather shamefully on Aug. 17 when CFL governors voted to pull the plug. The league’s last-ditch plea for $30 million in federal government funding had been denied three days earlier and governors were not prepared to finance an expensive bubble environment on their own.
Today, almost exactly three months after the season was mothballed, the phoenix flapped one of its wings and is threatening to rise out of the smouldering ashes.
The league really didn’t have any other choice. Whatever the mix of venue or venues, schedule length and potential attendance maximums, the CFL simply has to put its players and its product back on the field in 2021, lest the corporate brand and its public face, Ambrosie, be exposed to ever more bashing.
The league and commissioner have already taken plenty of lumps — and rightfully so — for the months of dithering while the National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and scads more pro sports organizations forged ahead during the pandemic, with varying degrees of safety and success.
Those other leagues have now produced plenty of pandemic dos and don’ts for the CFL to follow as its nine teams wade back into the sporting landscape. League staff and team governors must now zero in on a realistic return-to-play scenario and proceed with business as usual, or as close to usual as the pandemic eventually allows. He said all nine teams are on board.
Ambrosie told Postmedia that decisions have yet to be made on when teams will be allowed to resume signing free agents and what the Canadian and global combines might look like.
During the half-hour town hall, Ambrosie answered about 15 questions from the hundreds that were apparently submitted. He addressed queries about the state of a potential 10th franchise in Halifax, about future collective bargaining talks with the CFL Players Association, about social distancing and revenue streams.
The town hall kicked off Grey Cup Unite’s week-long celebration of the championship that wasn’t. Most festivities are restricted to online participation, though there are some socially distanced gatherings planned in various CFL cities. On tap for the rest of the week are three coaches media conferences, a Diversity is Strength racial justice roundtable featuring alumni and current coaches and players, the presentation of the all-decade team, a virtual business summit, a CFL Players Association state of the union and update on the CFLPA Academy, which helps prepare players for life after football.