AMBROSIE’S ASSESSMENT

Truncated CFL season or none at all

The outlook, via Randy Ambrosie, is anything but rosy.

While testifying Thursday to a House of Commons standing committee on finance, the Canadian Football League commissioner dropped a pair of bombshells.

“Our best-case scenario for this year is a drastically truncated season,” Ambrosie said. “And our most likely scenario is no season at all.”

Addressing the landscape beyond 2020, he said the league’s future is “very much in jeopardy” due to existing and anticipated damages wrought by COVID-19. As a major step toward sustaining the CFL, Ambrosie has asked the federal government for up to $150 million in financial assistance.

That news, which first circulated last week, raised eyebrows.

The immediate reaction here: “It can’t be that bad … can it?” Seemingly, it can.

This is hardly new ground for the CFL, which was on the precipice of extinction in the mid-1990s.

Grey Cup week in 1996, for example, was a death watch.

Ideally, all the discussion would have centred on luminaries like Doug Flutie, Michael (Pinball) Clemons, Ron Lancaster and Danny Mcmanus, but there was always the undercurrent of the league’s possible dissolution.

The future of the Roughriders, in particular, was imperilled.

After the Green and White defeated the B.C. Lions 27-19 on Oct. 19, 1996, the premise of my column was: “Could this be the last game at Taylor Field?”

Nobody seemed to think that it was a preposterous notion at the time.

In fact, the Roughriders soon announced plans for a buy-or-die telethon, which ultimately provided enough money to preserve the community-owned team.

Over time, the league also rallied, to the point where — despite occasional brush fires in Toronto, Ottawa, B.C., Montreal and Hamilton — the future of Canadian professional football did not

seem to to be endangered.

Nowhere was the turnaround more pronounced than in Saskatchewan, where the Roughriders went from a virtual charity case to a CFL goliath, a transformative 2007 season being the catalyst.

A state-of-the-art, $278-million stadium officially opened in 2017.

The gleaming new facility was supposed to be a cash cow for the Roughriders.

Now it sits, eerily vacant, on Elphinstone Street.

Will it end up being a monument to the not-too-distant past?

If Ambrosie’s worst fears are confirmed, could Mosaic Stadium 2.0 be the grandest amateur football stadium in the land? So many questions.

At this point, who can even pretend to have the answers?

In the meantime, there are apprehensions and fears.

Although there are issues of far greater magnitude than games people play at a time like this, there will eventually come a time when COVID is but a memory.

When that time does come, what will be left?

What will the business sector look like? What about the economy in general? What will be the plight of the average citizen?

However, there is the accompanying concern about what life might be like without a beloved football franchise.

Here, more than anywhere, the disappearance of the CFL would be a devastating blow.

At the dawn of this wretched year, 2020, people were talking excitedly about the 108th Grey Cup game, slated for Nov. 22 in Regina.

And now, with this season and that game being virtual writeoffs, one is left to wonder if there will be any future Grey Cups, period.

A chilling notion, yes, but one that is suddenly unavoidable.