OUT OF THE TUNNEL: A PRE-PREVIEW RANT

In less than two weeks the 2021 CFL season is about to start but it really doesn’t feel like it. Without a single CFL preseason game, the Olympics choking the sports landscape in Canada, the NHL expansion and entry draft clouding the airwaves and with so much NFL and NCAA football news, there isn’t even a crack of CFL sunshine peeking through the blinds.

How hard would it have been to have a single preseason week this weekend? We know it’s tough with nine-teams but any one of the three of Calgary, Edmonton or Saskatchewan could head to Vancouver next week to finish it off. 

After watching the Saskatchewan Roughriders intersquad game, there is going to be some really bad football to begin the season. Not just the regular old wonky Week 1 or 2 CFL games but truly awful football over the first three weeks of the season. Also, if you like to bet, bet the under on every CFL game to begin the season.

We here at Out of the Tunnel also dislike the Olympics. It is very hard to care about people and sports that we don’t even think about during the 208 weeks between Olympic Games. So with the Canadian sports media landscape currently choked with new “heroes” the beginning of the CFL season will pass by with more of a whimper than a bang.

Other than the Rod Pedersen media empire and 3DownNation it’s been difficult at best to find any single nugget of information outside of the handful of beat writers that remain in each CFL city.

It’s going to be a giant uphill climb for the Canadian Football League to get back into the day-to-day sports media landscape. Sports media is still shrinking at an incredible rate and there isn’t much on YouTube and just a handful of podcasts to whet the football appetite.

So it needs to be put in the hands of the League and there are so many ways to try to rebuild an audience. 

We have harped on this so many times, but the League needs to wrestle some of the broadcast contract away from TSN and allow the free reign of CFL highlights on every channel. Like the NBA and MLB, it would bring exposure to another level and build an audience that will actually tune into a CFL broadcast. It’s currently the tail wagging the dog.

To add, can we have a CFL streaming package?

Have you noticed there are so many people that have become fans of Formula 1 auto racing? We have. The answer is easy, the Netflix show Drive to Survive is the number one reason why open wheel racing from Europe has exploded in North America the past couple of years.

This is a slick co-production between Netflix Europe and Box to Box Productions. Netflix has done a great job expanding their productions all over the world and there are dollars available in Canada. 

There is a fantastic opportunity to have a “Season With: Insert CFL Team”. 

It won’t be as slick as the Formula 1 or HBO’s ‘Hard Knocks’ productions but more like Netflix’s ‘Last Chance U’ or HBO’s ‘All or Nothing’ sports series. 

With Parliament approving C-10 that will mandate that Canadian content is front and centre on digital platforms, there will be an opportunity to grab some of those Netflix funds and so much other funding available in Canada to create a production like this.

This can’t be the usual Insight Productions (they do a great job but they do everything in Canada) because there is a very identifiable look from them and frankly, we are craving something different.

Getting a CFL football operations group to allow this will be also very difficult. They run the roost in the CFL to a fault. The football operations staffs have way too much power over the marketing of the CFL that something like a ‘Season with” program may not even get past the league approval level. It’s another case of the tail wagging the dog. Like the NFL the promotion and selling of the league is front and centre and for the good of the CFL this also needs to happen.

Now to the football news south of the border. 

NFL training camps are opening up on July 27 and get ready for the deluge of news. From Urban Meyer and number one pick Trevor Lawrence in Jacksonville to Tom Brady in Tampa Bay, it will be like drinking from a fire hose with the amount of information coming from all 32 training camp sites.

This has also been the biggest offseason in the history of NCAA football. The complete landscape of college football has changed in just four months.

Name, image and likeness (NIL) rules are now ubiquitous in all of college football. We finally get to see athletes make the money they should have been able to 30 years ago. There is so much money going around, Alabama head coach Nick Saban said that his starting quarterback Bryce Young has compensation up to “seven figures” right now. 

It will be interesting to see how some schools deal with this and how some will be completely left behind.

The NCAA also approved a 12-team playoff. There is no word on when this will start but the current TV contract with the four-team playoff ends after the 2025-26 season but this may be pushed up.

We will also see a pseudo free agency coming to NCAA football as they approved the one time transfer exception in all sports. Now a player no longer needs to sit out a season after transferring schools nor do they need to graduate from a school before becoming a grad-transfer.

Finally, the first step towards three or four super conferences are in place with Texas and Oklahoma wanting out of the BIG12 and entry into the Southeastern Conference (SEC). This will destroy the BIG12 and make the SEC even more powerful than they are currently.