Hello excellence, goodbye gong show

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/06/2011 (5249 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What a difference a few years has made.

Flashback barely a decade and the immediate future of the CFL was in doubt, while the Goliath that is the NFL looked stronger than it had ever been.

These days the opposite seems true — the NFL finds itself mired in a labour quagmire and facing the prospect it might not even open for business this season, while the CFL is enjoying what is starting to look a lot like a golden age.

As the 2011 CFL season gets underway this week, there is a case to be made that the Canadian league has never been stronger. The television ratings are huge, with a lucrative new deal on the horizon. A new stadium is going up in Winnipeg, there’s a commitment to a complete overhaul of Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton and a massive renovation is taking place at B.C. Place in Vancouver, where — by the way — tickets for the 2011 Grey Cup are already 90 per cent sold.

Saskatchewan is making record profits, Montreal’s Percival Molson Stadium is a licence to print money, Calgary loves a winner, people in Edmonton continue to turn out despite a truly awful team and the situation in Toronto appears to at least be stable.

And so for once, all the most compelling league storylines heading into the new CFL season look to be on the field, instead of off of it.

Thursday, I’ll look more closely at the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ upcoming season. Today, here are five storylines across the CFL I will be watching for:

1. The end of the Montreal juggernaut?

The Montreal Alouettes have been the class of the CFL for the past three years, representing the East Division in each of the last three championship games and winning the last two. But the departure of running back Avon Cobourne to Hamilton in the off-season and the retirement of clutch receiver Ben Cahoon creates a couple of big voids on offence. And while Anthony Calvillo appears to be ageless, the fact is he will turn 39 this year and all his recent health scares and family dramas, coupled with a mind-boggling 17 previous seasons in the CFL, are bound to catch up to him eventually. The question is whether it will be this year.

2. Does the green balloon finally burst?

The Saskatchewan Roughriders have been to three of the last four Grey Cups and have also morphed into an organization off the field that has become the gold standard in the CFL. But there are big question marks hovering over this club on the field heading into the 2011 season. The vaunted Canadian Air Force is no more, with the departure of Andy Fantuz to the NFL and Rob Bagg to injury. The kicking game, judging by the pre-season, is a gong show. And injuries to both projected starters at defensive end — R.J. Roberts and especially Brent Hawkins — has folks wondering where the pass rush will come from, at least early on.

3. Do the Argos finally float their boat?

The Boatmen took a huge step towards respectability under GM/head coach Jim Barker last year with a playoff win over Hamilton. A big off-season trade with Winnipeg aimed at shoring up their quarterback situation by landing Steven Jyles has been a bust so far as Jyles continues to recuperate from shoulder surgery. But it hasn’t mattered, as Cleo Lemon has run away with the starter’s job during the pre-season and looked every bit like an upper-echelon starter at Canad Inns Stadium last week. Add to that a solid running game in Cory Boyd that is second only to Winnipeg’s Fred Reid and a consistently reliable and hard-hitting defence and you have the makings of a potentially dramatic football renaissance in Toronto this season.

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4. Will the real B.C. Lions please stand up?

There were two B.C. Lions teams in 2010 — the one that went 1-7 to start the season and the one that went 7-3 to finish it. The difference was starting QB Travis Lulay, who took over from Casey Printers and showed the Lions to be a competitive football team after all. The talk in B.C. is that the three-year CFL veteran, with all of 10 starts on his CFL resumé, has the makings of a bona fide superstar. Head coach Wally Buono has given Lulay the keys to the club in the form of the starting job and the stakes are huge in a year in which the Lions will unveil new B.C. Place and host the Grey Cup.

5. So just how dopey, really, is the CFL?

There have long been suggestions that steroid use in the CFL is rampant. The Bombers’ own Doug Brown has said it was so obvious at times over the years that it had literally become a joke among players. So now we will finally get some data to go with all those anecdotes. With a first-ever random drug-testing policy in place in the CFL this year, the cheaters — or at least some of them — are finally going to get caught under a policy that will see one out of four players tested this season. Under the policy, first-time violators — and even the existence of the violation — is supposed to be kept secret. But the CFL is a tiny little club and it seems hard to believe the secrets will be safe very long. Just ask all those Major League Baseball cheaters who also thought their failed tests were going to be a secret, until BALCO came along.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca