OUT OF THE TUNNEL: A DEEP DIVE ON THE BUBBLE CITY CONCEPT

BY: RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF

With businesses starting to slowly open up across the country, there’s a little hope that some normalcy will return. Unfortunately, gathering en masse for a concert or sporting event likely isn’t in the cards in the very near future.

This includes the CFL and the league’s best barometre on how things are going is its flagship franchise over the past 10 years, the Saskatchewan Roughriders. This week wasn’t a good one for the team or the future of the 2020 season.

The Leader-Post’s Murray McCormick broke the news Friday that the football club made paycuts across the board on both sides of the operation (business and football). The sting is palpable as this was the weekend training camp was to start.

If the Riders announce layoffs in the near future then the season is all but over. This is a team that is supposed to be preparing for a Grey Cup and if they are to lay off the staff needed to put on an event like this, it would be the death nail.

The one very small glimmer of hope came from TSN’s Farhan Lalji this week that the CFL is considering having a shortened season in “hub cities”. The main reason for this is to have bailout money more readily available for the league and its players. 3DownNation’s Justin Dunk also elaborated on it more on the Rod Pedersen Show on Friday. 

One of the cities being bantied about is Regina. Now nothing has been discussed at any level of government so right now it’s just a pipe dream, but let’s dream a little because it’s all we have right now.

If this was to happen there are so many hoops to jump through to get games on the field and to be honest, the more we thought this through, the less likely any of this can happen.

The first assumption is that the whole of the CFL’s West Division will be in Regina. This would be coaches, players and medical staff. As for support staff like communications and digital staffs, it would likely have to be covered by the league. More on that a little later.

The first is to get approval from all levels of government. The pure bureaucracy of trying to get this to happen is mind-boggling. The municipal and provincial levels of government would have to make Regina (and the entire province) ready to have an influx of people coming here. The Federal government would have to give clearance to allow players and coaches into the country. Not to mention approving any sort of potential funding that would help ensure the prospect of a season being played.

Logistically getting players into Regina would be a complete nightmare. Despite Regina’s airport being called international, getting players into the Queen City from across North America is incredibly difficult and that’s at the best of times. Now with flights drastically reduced, getting players into Regina easily and efficiently would be nearly impossible.

Once the players and staff make it to Regina they would likely need to be tested and quarantined for 14 days. Here is another big step in bureaucracy: how can you allow access to, and pay for, at least 500 tests for non-citizens of the province? This would need heavy public buy-in, especially if the tests are needed at a later date. The good news is that tests are becoming much more readily available. (With a cost, of course).

So if you get the players into the country, tested and quarantined, it’s then time to think about the logistics of playing actual games.

The five West Division teams that are in Regina would have their practice fields and times divided among Mosaic Stadium, Leibel Field and the University of Regina with Optimist Park being an extra field just in case (of course, there are always those hallowed fields in Saskatoon as well but let’s keep the can of worms to the province’s capital for now).

The season could end up as a 12-week, ten-game schedule with three games against a pair of teams and two-games against the other two teams. There would be a pair of bye-weeks for each team. In the east, everyone would play three times against each other with a fourth game thrown in to complete the schedule.

Then if all of that is successful there would be the semi-final and final games leading up to the Grey Cup.

Let’s propose Week 1 being Labour Day. We figure the league would need a minimum five week lead-up to bring players in, quarantine them, and then host a brief training camp. This would mean players and staff would have to begin arriving in the city by mid-July which doesn’t give the CFL a lot of time to get a plan in place.

The big question: how would the players get paid? Well, this is a desperate time for the league and the league itself would need to pay the players, rather than individual teams. This will not be nine separate franchises but two giant, 15-week football jamborees to keep the league alive.

The players would receive a pro-rated salary based on the 10-game schedule with bonuses still being honoured (like report-to-play, roster and stats-based bonuses). 

We will have to assume that there would not be crowds in attendance for the games. The current standard is the German Bundesliga where game days see the capacity of all involved in the game under 300. This would include all football personnel, TV broadcasters, league staff and media. 

The CFL would cover all communications, digital and social media to keep costs low.

The salaries for all would be paid for via TV money from TSN and any potential Federal bailout.

This is all pie-in-the-sky thinking and we admit there are a lot of holes in our thinking.

The pitfalls are almost too numerous for this to work.

Is there enough money between the television contract and any bailout money to make this work? There needs to be enough money to pay for players and staff salaries, facilities, hotels, food and almost every other thing needed to make this work.

Even if this is a possibility, how many players would leave their families to come to Regina or Ottawa or any other CFL city for a pittance of a salary and for 20 or less weeks of work?

Saskatchewan, and more specifically Regina, has seen low numbers of positive tests for COVID-19 recently, but the possibility of this being a hot spot of a second wave is always there. It’s impossible to keep everyone in a football-only bubble like what’s proposed by the NBA or NHL. Regina itself would be the bubble.

The final part of this is to get league-wide approval. It’s tough to have a franchise torn from a city and play in a neutral site just for the sake of playing games. It would take the cooperation of every employee across the league to make this work.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. And so we wait with bated breath to see what the CFL will become.

(RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF)