FIRST AND GOAL

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/09/2010 (5529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Five storylines that jumped out while observing the past week of Canadian Football League action:

1 We begin this week by raining on a parade and playing the sourpuss…

It’s about the Touchdown Atlantic game this weekend in Moncton featuring the Edmonton Eskimos and Toronto Argonauts. Look, it’s a superb idea to market the game and this great league in the Maritimes and the folks in New Brunswick are doing everything they can to make the event a rousing success.

But if there is no end goal here — i.e., expansion to Atlantic Canada — then it’s an undertaking with limited long-term impact. CFL commissioner Mark Cohon was in Antigonish, N.S., on Tuesday and said this about future expansion to the Maritimes:

“Do I think that dream is becoming a possibility? I think yes, it’s becoming a possibility. Is it a probability or a reality? The answer is that we’re not there yet.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

Yes, you could say that. Extra seats added to Moncton Stadium have bumped up capacity to 21,000 — short of the minimum 25,000 required to come close to making a new franchise remotely profitable. And here’s the other big nugget missing: Nobody has stepped forward to play the money man and own the franchise.

In other words, this is all no further ahead today than it was in the early 1980s when the Atlantic Schooners were granted a conditional franchise but couldn’t make the stadium financing work.

2 Folks in Rider Nation, already questioning head coach Ken Miller’s decision to punt rather than kick a 35-yard field goal in Friday’s OT win over Calgary, won’t like his latest explanation on the call.

“I have some arguments that make sense to me but maybe not to anyone else,” Miller said Tuesday. “Did you watch him punt today? His shortest one was 48 yards and that was across the field so if you do the hypotenuse of the right triangle that’s going to be about 65 or 70. The wind’s blowing 36 km/h today. The other night it was 47 km/h. If you look at that, the odds are that he’s going to kick it through the end zone easily. But he mis-hit the ball so it made it look like a really bad call.”

Hypotenuse of the right triangle? Really?

3 Keep an eye on how CFL headquarters responds to the Jason-Jimenez-on-Brent-Johnson cheap shot from Saturday night. In case you missed it, Jimenez — the former B.C. Lions tackle now with Hamilton — hit Johnson low to the knees after the whistle and while the defender had his back turned.

Jimenez received a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty but now has a size-large bull’s-eye on his back.

“I thought it was dirty. I thought it was uncalled for,” said Lions centre Angus Reid of the Jimenez hit. “It wasn’t related to the play. And I, personally, thought it was a blatantly dirty hit.”

4 We know they’re human. And, yes, we all make mistakes. But doesn’t another officiating error — this one gave the Ticats a critical TD in their win over B.C. — scream out that the league needs to spend even more cash on training for its referees?

CFL director of officiating Tom Higgins has said, again, that the officals erred in first calling back a Ticat touchdown for an illegal block and then allowing it to stand because the play occurred behind the line of scrimmage. GM Wally Buono’s response, we can only surmise, would have been the same of Winnipeg head coach Paul LaPolice earlier this year when Higgins called to admit an earlier error: ‘Gee, thanks for that Tom. But how does that apology get us into the playoffs again?’

5 And, finally, Senator David Braley won’t be happy with these numbers. The owner of the Argonauts and Lions must have been squirming when the turnstile totals came in from weekend games in The Big Smoke and Vancouver. The Argo-Bomber game drew just 19,662 at Rogers Centre — the lowest crowd in the CFL this year — while the Ticat-Lions contest at Empire Field drew 21,481, the fifth-lowest in the league this year. All told, six of the seven lowest crowds this season have been in either B.C. or Toronto (the other was a Bomber-Ticat contest in Hamilton on July 16).

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca