Is it a crack in the door, or the opening of the floodgates?

The NFL has announced that over the next sixteen years, its member franchises will be taking their home games on the road internationally. Each team will be expected to play one of its home games in a foreign locale over the length of the plan. It‘s a bid to develop an even wider audience (as if it’s really needed) for the most profitable professional sport in North America, if not possibly the world.

The announcement has once again brought up the prospect of an NFL invasion of Toronto the long desired dream of more than a few people of Southern Ontario. For certain one of these “home but road” games will migrate to the Rogers Centre, others are being considered for BC Place and either Calgary or Edmonton as the NFL looks at the vacation flyers from Canada, Mexico, England and parts of Europe and Asia as potential sites.

David Naylor sounds an alarm in the Globe and Mail, over the prospect of the NFL coming across the line and sending a chill up the spines of those that run the CFL. Perhaps a wee overstatement about a couple of NFL games that may stray north of the 49th parallel. He retraces the groundwork that the folks looking to bring a team north have done so far and how their plans continue to this day.

While Toronto may one day join the lodge, even that isn’t as much of a touchdown pass as the excited Torontonians might think, before Toronto will be considered there is still a matter of putting a team (or maybe two) into Los Angeles, not to mention a few other hotbeds of football that would move whatever it takes to bring the game to their hometown.

When the games come north, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be providing the on the edge of your seat kind of excitement that the NFL acolytes suggest. On the contrary more likely than not, an NFL Sunday regular season contest will be a low scoring, hard slogging bore fest, as the concept of offence sometimes gets left in the dressing room on any given Sunday.

Naylor sees the NFL games as a problem; it could just be another bump in what seems like a normally bumpy road for the CFL.

NFL coming to Canada not good news for CFL
ANALYSIS: When the show goes off without a hitch, it will be sending a chill up the spines of many in the CFL, DAVID NAYLOR writes
DAVID NAYLOR
Globe and Mail
Thursday, October 26, 2006

There is no doubt what the reaction will be when the National Football League brings its first regular-season game to Canada in 2008.

No matter which teams are involved and how meaningful or meaningless the game might be, you can bet the house will be full, the energy will be electric and the fans will do their best to show they know a good thing when they see it.

There will be lots of glitz and lots of star power in a scene that will be beamed throughout North America and trumpeted as a success.

That's going to be a depressing day for a whole bunch of people who still cling to the notion that Canada's football of choice is the humble three-down variety, which continues to weather each and every storm that comes its way.

Yet for others, seeing an NFL regular-season game on Canadian soil will be viewed as one great step closer to the inevitable arrival of a Toronto franchise, a dream long held by many fans in Southern Ontario, not to mention the city's two most powerful sports entrepreneurs, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment chairman Larry Tanenbaum and Rogers Communications chief executive officer Ted Rogers.

It should be noted that the NFL's decision this week to play regular-season games in Mexico, Canada and Europe, beginning next season, is distinct from the notion of expanding or relocating a franchise outside the United States.

The vision of playing games beyond the U.S. borders was hatched under former commissioner Paul Tagliabue and handed off to his successor, Roger Godell. Under the formula approved on Tuesday, the NFL gets to put its toe into international waters without exposing itself to any degree of risk or upsetting the league's configuration as it now exists.

It just so happens this latest initiative coincides with a heightened sense that Toronto's quest for an NFL franchise may not be such a pipe dream after all.

First came this fall's public pronouncement that Tanenbaum and Rogers were teaming up with the shared intent of landing an NFL team for the city. That was followed by a report from Sports Illustrated football writer Peter King that a Canadian group (presumably Rogers and Tanenbaum) had attempted to buy the New Orleans Saints last fall with the intent of moving them north of the border.

That fact only fuelled speculation that Tanenbaum and Rogers are eyeing the Buffalo Bills, a team owned by 88-year-old Ralph Wilson and likely to be put up for sale after he dies.

Not insignificantly, Tanenbaum and Rogers are sure to be front and centre when the NFL regular-season extravaganza comes to Toronto.

Representatives of both men were in attendance when the NFL staged its first international game last season in Mexico City, where they openly lobbied for a Toronto game.

And when the show goes off in Toronto without a hitch, as it surely will, it's only going to improve the city's standing with the NFL for what may lie ahead.

All of which must be sending a chill up the spines of many in the CFL these days in what has been a lousy year for the league on several fronts.

CFL officials were supportive of the NFL's news this week, which they have known was coming for a while. The league long ago got assurances that the NFL would not interfere with the 2007 Grey Cup game in Toronto, for which it expressed great gratitude.

But by no means is this good news for the CFL, which continues to fight the good fight in what remains an uphill battle in Toronto. Simply put, the notion of having 55,000 fans pack the Rogers Centre for an NFL game while the Argos draw roughly half that number is hardly good optics for the league.

And it's likely to be enough to make many in the CFL consider the reality of an NFL team in Toronto and how the CFL might have to reinvent itself to survive in such a postapocalyptic football world.

Historically, the NFL has been happy to remain within U.S. borders, to build its game on the backs of American television and push its limits of growth on home soil. This week's vote wasn't a vote to end that philosophy. But it's certainly a hint that the league's long-held stand against a team in Canada might be loosening somewhat.