At the start of the season hopes were high in Southern Ontario that a kind of Golden era of Canadian Football might return to the Golden Horseshoe on the shores of Lake Ontario. As the season meanders on however, things are rather stormy in both Toronto and Hamilton.
Injuries in Argoland and on field ineptness in Steeltown have both teams struggling through the first half of the season. And while the crowds continue to offer up their support, the end result isn't at all what anyone thought it would be when training camps broke in June.
Stepehen Brunt did an excellent job of examining the situation facing both teams in his column Wednesday for the Globe and Mail.
On-field success eluding Ticats, Argos
STEPHEN BRUNT
Finding success in the Canadian Football League -- that is, finishing anywhere other than last or second last among the eight franchises -- can't be considered one of the tougher challenges in professional sport.
The hard part has always been the other side of the business, filling the seats in problematic markets. Winning games and winning championships, everyone does, eventually. In some places, though, it seemed nearly impossible to make anyone care when it happened.
But just try explaining that right now to the folks who operate the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Toronto Argonauts, both teams reinvented in the marketplace and both struggling on the field to keep their heads above water in a very shallow pond.
As everyone knows, the Southern Ontario franchises are four summers removed from bankruptcy, financial problems that had precious little to do with performance on the field. The Argos were capturing back-to-back Grey Cups with Doug Flutie in the midst of their long decline, and the Ticats won a championship for owners David Macdonald and George Grant, who otherwise did precious little to stem the tide of local indifference.
Now, the situation is reversed. When the Argos stank out the Rogers Centre last week against the B.C. Lions, they did so in front of 28,000 paying customers. Meanwhile, the Ticats had nearly full house of 27,000 to watch them get shut out at home for the first time in half a century when they lost to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
So how can it be that good owners and strong organizations fail so miserably on the football side? Maybe because for both of them, success came a little too easily, too fast, and because both chose not to follow the tried and true recipes for CFL success. What seemed like bold, original thinking just a couple of years ago doesn't seem quite so clever right now.
The Argos, at least, can chalk up some of their travails this season to injuries.
But the truth is that running back Ricky Williams was a non-factor before he broke his arm.
And beyond Williams, the team was banking too heavily on Damon Allen, a 43-year-old quarterback (albeit one coming off the best season of his career as a 42-year-old) without a surefire successor in place.
Even if Allen hadn't gone down, though, it's an open question whether putting such a premium on continuity, on keeping the happy family together, would have caught up to the Argos this season.
The best CFL team builders (Montreal's Jim Popp first among them) renew their rosters every year, not with other people's overpriced stars, but with hungry guys you've never heard of who fall through the cracks in the National Football League.
With largely the same cast in place, the Argos went from a miracle Grey Cup in Howard Sokolowski and David Cynamon's first year as the owners, to a surprise loss in the Eastern final last season, to ineptitude. Now, change is in the wind, but perhaps too late.
In Hamilton, the contrasts are even more striking. Bob Young is always happy to explain how little he knows about football. And as a businessman, one of the things he realized first about professional sports was that you can't base tickets sales on winning championships because it is by definition a sometime thing, and there are bills to pay every year.
He hired brilliantly in building a marketing team, but built his football organization largely on instinct, violating several tried and true rules in the process: he hired a coach with no professional experience, who in turn hired rookie co-ordinators, and he kept the guy who had coached the team to a 1-17 record the year before, Ron Lancaster, on the payroll as a nod to his long, meritorious service.
For a year, it all seemed to work magically. The 'Cats slipped into the playoffs, Greg Marshall was the coach of the year, Lancaster easily filled the elder statesman role and out-of-the-box thinking was all the rage. By year three, Young -- understanding that his consumers were getting restless -- was dropping large amounts of money to sign name-brand players who were being rewarded for past performance in other places. He made a fall guy of the previous offensive co-ordinator, hiring as his replacement someone who seemed safe and experienced -- Joe Paopao. He relied on a general manager who wasn't a conventional football guy, and he wound up firing his own, hand-picked head coach in midseason, replacing him at least temporarily with the same man Marshall had succeeded.
The stands are packed at Ivor Wynne, the corporate community is fighting for space in the stadium, the Tiger-Cats are awful and the football operation from the outside sure seems dysfunctional.
It's as though they figured out how to split the atom, but never learned how to turn on the lights.
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