STACKHOUSE’S 10 THOUGHTS

1 – RIDERS REVIEW – For three quarters, the Saskatchewan Roughriders home opener was painful to watch as Cody Fajardo barely even attempted a pass beyond seven yards but things opened up in a big way late over the last 17 or so minutes and before you knew it, you look at the stat sheet and Fajardo had 311 yards passing, 42 yards rushing, a passing touchdown that was a heckuva throw to Kian Schaffer-Baker, and no interceptions. The offensive line didn’t allow a single sack, the defense picked off Dane Evans twice, and really dominated the entire game.

2 – ATTENDANCE – You have to talk about it.You can ignore it if you want but that doesn’t make the problem go away.  The Calgary Stampeders have gone from 26,000 home opener in 2019 to 21,000 home opener in 2022. The Riders went from 30,000 to 28,000 (paid, not actually present and the difference between paid and present will matter at some point but it doesn’t today) over the same time period for home openers. Winnipeg went from 25,000 in 2019 to 29,000 in 2021 to 26,000 this weekend. The BC Lions should be commended for their 34,000+ in a beatdown of Edmonton and hopefully they can keep it going.  Naysayers will point to the attraction of One Republic before the game but it doesn’t matter to me how you get the bums in the seats as long as you get them. If you want to sell a concert complemented by a football game, so be it.  

3 – REASONS FOR DIMINISHED FANS – Ultimately we can speculate all day but this is on the individual teams to figure out and solve. I guess we will see how passionate the people are that work in various team offices around the CFL. For the Riders, you can go on social media and read all sorts of criticism that range from dividing the public over the vax pass to being too complacent and expecting fans to just show up without having to work to earn the customer’s business to reduced quality of play on the field to other things that are out of everyone’s control such as inflation and high gas prices. If it’s fuel prices, then there is some onus on those in the sports and entertainment industry to start speaking up for their own well being. If people decide putting food on the table is more important than dropping $500 a game for the Roughriders, that is going to have a major impact on the business of the CFL club. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, the Roughriders have a major voice in this province and if gas prices are resulting in thousands of empty seats per home game, they need to speak up NOW and start lobbying. It doesn’t mean they’ll get what they want but it would go a long way to influencing a general public that feels abandoned by those in control.  Make no mistake about it. Financial gas relief could be forthcoming if enough people raised a stink but maybe it’s just not that important.

4 – EXCUSE OR REASON – I saw Rod’s post over the weekend about if you want to go to a sports event you will find a way and if you don’t, you will make up excuses rather than just be honest and say you really don’t want to go. I will take a bit of an issue with that because there are a lot of things I’d like to do (not just sports related) but money or lack of it gets in the way. That could be an excuse, I suppose. I mean I could sell my house and move into something much smaller and put the profit away in a separate bank account to use up when I want to enjoy some of the more non-essential things life has to offer but it comes down to priorities for me. Is that an excuse?  Could be. Here’s where he’s right though – as long as you have people willing to pay $100 to walk around the concourse in Edmonton to watch the Oilers on television at Rexall, there is no need to even give inflation or cost of living a second thought. But, would the Elks get away with that? No. I’m going to suggest that in 2013, the Riders probably could have made money in a similar way but they aren’t doing it today. Are those people making excuses or is it just not financially feasible to toss away $100 to crane your neck up at a television while standing in the middle of a crowded concourse when you can lay on the couch and watch a big screen from a closer distance for free from home?

5 – SACRIFICES – I’m not sure sports teams and leagues have caught on yet, but as people are forced to make choices about what to spend their money on, sports and entertainment will be one of the first casualties. Yes, there are still enough people with enough money for this to be widely ignored but there will come a time when gas approaches $3 -$3.50 a litre and even those people will have to give up luxury. By then, it will be way too late to even think about trying to do something about it. I hate to break it to you, but it’s going to get even worse for us. This is way too deep for most to comprehend but one very effective way for Russia to counter the sanctions it’s facing is through starvation of the western world. Space won’t permit me to go into it with the depth this deserves but grain facilities are being blocked and spiking gas prices does affect everything, not just travel in your vehicle. Couple that with the fact oil companies aren’t going to invest more money in an industry governments have openly targeted for elimination and you have a perfect storm brewing for disaster but maybe if we keep pretending none of this is going on, it will just magically go away.

6 – ROURKE/ELKS MIX – Is Nathan Rourke the best young quarterback to play in the CFL in decades or are the Edmonton Elks that unwatchable? Rourke was 26-of-29 for three scores and he also rushed for two in BC’s lopsided win. When Chris Jones ran the Riders, he didn’t give two hoots about the entertainment quality on the field. His focus was on winning and that sometimes meant throwing in the towel on an entire season to find the right mix of players going forward. I’ll never forgive him for not even trying to field a winning team for the last ever game at Taylor Field but it really didn’t matter because the place was packed. The Elks, however, aren’t in a position where fans are going to blindly support a team that gets blasted on a weekly basis while Jones performs surgery on the roster. Commonwealth will be empty before Labour Day if this team isn’t competitive and they already have plenty of hurdles to overcome with fans as it is. I always said Jones deserved a lot of credit for ensuring the Riders were competitive on a yearly basis, but the price for me as a fan to watch them win 15-12 every week with less than stellar role models getting into various levels of trouble in the community just wasn’t worth it. I’d rather they lose 31-28 with good people, but I’m probably in the minority on that.  

7 – RATTLERS – The Saskatchewan Rattlers are perfect at home, and 0-for on the road this season but they’ve had a brutal start to the schedule through the first six games. At the time of this writing, all five games have come against the top four teams in the league and those teams have a combined record of 16-and-6 with two of those losses coming against the Rattlers. What is apparent is that the Rattlers can be an electric 3-point shooting team and they’ll be capable of putting up a big number on the scoreboard because of it. Last season they had only Devonte Bandoo as a legitimate threat and this year they have Bandoo, Scottie Lindsey, and Tony Carr all averaging in the neighborhood of 20 points a game. They’ll need a bit more consistency out of Jordy Tshimanga on the glass and also keep the opposite team from running up high scoring totals in order to be more successful but it’s hard to be critical when they are coming off a combined 2-and-18 record in the last two years and have managed to tread water despite this gauntlet of games.

8 – LIGHTNING CROW – I’ve already eaten plenty of crow on this but I may as well go for another serving.  The Tampa Bay Lightning aren’t too tired of playing hockey after all. In the series against Toronto, it appeared to me that after three games the Lightning just looked like a team that was fatigued from being in back to back Stanley Cup finals and were willing to just pack up their bags and head home for the Summer.  Nope. They are probably going to win their third Stanley Cup in a row and belong in the dynasty conversation. Is this the best team the NHL has seen since the 1980-83 New York Islanders? You had teams like the mid-80s Oilers, the late-90s Red Wings, the turn of the century Devils, and the Blackhawks teams of the 2010s but the Lightning are better than all of those if they complete the threepeat. 

9 – NHL TV NUMBERS – This is interesting. If you look at the US numbers, the Lightning and Rangers pulled in multi-year highs. Game 5 was up 93% from last year’s game five between the Lightning and Islanders. Overall, the series was up 75% from the same series last year and 27% from 2019.  The entire postseason is delivering at 30% better than 2021. Now, let’s look at Canada. The playoffs began with a blazing start posting historic numbers but have since fallen off a cliff.  I’m going to surmise two major reasons for this – 1) it’s June.  2) no Canadian teams left. So how big of a hockey fan are we in this country? I’ve questioned our allegiance to sports a lot over the last two years and once again it shows. We just don’t care and the NHL knows there are more potential eyeballs south of the border so they’ll continue to push their product in that direction. What’s the upside to doing it here?

10 – PGA DEFECTIONS – This new LIV Golf Tour is creating quite a stir amongst golf enthusiasts as numerous players have defected from the PGA chasing the potential for more guaranteed money. While most people don’t mind competition as a means to make professional golf better, there seems to be a bit of hand wringing over the fact the LIV Tour is backed by unethical Saudi Arabia yet I don’t see anyone boycotting the products the US and Canada import from Saudi Arabia on a yearly basis so our outrage, as usual, is quite selective and only limited to areas where the person offended isn’t actually impacted at all.

(Mike Stackhouse is a freelance writer/broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @Stack1975)