RANDY’S ROAD TRIP HITS REGINA

Here are some notes and quotes from CFL Commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s stop at Mosaic Stadium on Saturday as part of his annual Randy’s Road Trip across CFL cities:

• Ambrosie joked that he was handed a hand-written certificate which recognized him as the CFL’s best Commissioner!
• He’s excited to bring the 2020 Grey Cup to Regina, and that Rider Nation’s been waiting for this opportunity since the stadium opened in 2017. He said the City of Regina is flourishing and growing, and Canadian football fans are excited for the CFL championship week in November.
• The Commissioner said fans are sometimes under-appreciated but almost 10-million Canadians watched at least some portion of the Grey Cup game. More than 2-million fans bought tickets to CFL games which underscores the fact the CFL is a huge pro sports entity.
• “We’re big but I promise you we should be bigger, and can be bigger,” Ambrosie said. He believes a 10th CFL team being situated in Halifax will transform the CFL. He wants to reshape the league’s relationship with the players and has meetings planned soon with the Players Association. He has unanimous support from the governors to reward the players more and expand revenue growth. He wants salaries and total earnings of the players to rise, in order to attract and keep the best players. The League is sharing the teams’ business plans with the coaches and GMs because they’re smart people and need to be a part of it. More needs to be done with the Alumni too. Some of them are the greatest heroes it the history of the game and not enough has been done to celebrate them.
• They have a plan for the biggest fan outreach program in the history of professional sports which includes hitting as many classrooms as possible from coast-to-coast. Not hundreds of visits, but thousands of visits and it’s possible. They want to talk to kids whose families have been in Canada from five generations to just five months. Sometimes the CFL is “too Canadian” (i.e. too humble) and they need to strive to be as big as possible.
• Ambrosie referenced the leadership of NBA Commissioner David Stern and how he took that league global and it’s because he had the courage to believe in a bigger, stronger NBA. “Why should we take a backseat to anyone?” Ambrosie questioned. “We shouldn’t. We don’t have to. It’s time to think of ourselves differently.” He wants to be the biggest football league in the world, and mentioned their partnership with 14 football-playing countries. “If we embrace the world, the world will embrace us back,” Ambrosie said. “We can make the world a better place through the game of football, by building bridges instead of walls.”
• “You are the most magnificent lesson in this league. This group and this province are a magnificent example. I played at Taylor Field, and this isn’t always the way it was. Your community leaders wanted something better and this is now the living, breathing example of what it means to dream big. I think I left an ACL and an ankle on that concrete turf at Taylor Field and now I look at this place and think ‘How far they’ve come‘. You had a vision for a bigger, stronger Saskatchewan and this is the best example of what can happen. I ask you to drag the rest of the CFL along to imagine how good it can be.”

Q & A SEGMENT

Q: For Jeremy O’Day – What was your strategy for free agency?

JO: First off, as far as Randy saying he’s the best Commissioner in the CFL, I can tell you I’m not the best GM in Saskatchewan. As a matter of fact, there are about 60 here in the crowd and another 40,000-50,000 sitting at home! I appreciate the question. Free agency for every team is different depending on the state of the roster, the age of your players and how you came out of last season. Ideally the reason you’d be super-active in free agency is that you don’t feel real good about your team. Last year we added a lot of guys but this year we just wanted to get our guys back. We wanted to come into this year with as many guys back from 2019 as possible. We thought we had a chance at winning the Grey Cup last year and feel we have a group that can do it this year. Plus there’s the salary cap. We told our players last year we wanted them all back but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. We believe in our players and we believe that’ll pay off. They’re very motivated.

Q: For Craig Reynolds – How do you see the CFL West playing out?

CR: It’s such a competitive division. That’s a credit to Randy’s leadership and what we’re doing as a league. It’s a credit to the salary cap too. We’ve had a different Grey Cup champion in 10 of the last 11 years or something like that. It’s a dogfight in the West and the East will be more competitive as well. There is no free space on the bingo card or freebies and I expect that’ll continue in 2020.

Q: For Randy Ambrosie – what’s the focus on developing Canadian talent?

RA: That’s a great question. In part, the answer is having a sit-down with a bunch of leaders of the amateur football community here. We need to get more involved and more active. One of the challenges we face is, how do we get more kids playing football? That’s why we launched the Try Football campaign last year. You can’t play football alone. We need to get more footballs into kids’ hands. We’ve discussed combining the Vanier Cup and Grey Cup so that these players can play on the biggest stage. Craig tried really, really hard to do it for 2020 but it’ll become a reality in 2021.

Q: For Randy Ambrosie – What does it take to become the Commissioner of the CFL?

RA: It stands by standing at a microphone and asking that question! Thank you. I think anyone can become the Commissioner of this league but for me, fortunately I played which helped a little bit. I was a terrible student when I was your age, and then I became better and realized I could be in the front half of the class rather than the back half. Study hard and do your homework!

Q: How do you like Cody Fajardo at QB?

JO: Well we’re thinking about trading him! No, we feel very good about him. The nice part about coming into this year is having a franchise QB and we also think he can grow and improve. It’s nice coming into the year knowing he’s your QB. Hopefully he starts off where he left off.

Q: What’s the 2 Quarterback situation?

RA: We have gone into that exercise and it was something negotiated with the players. Very seldomly has a 3rd-string QB come in as an emergency. We’ve almost never seen it. It was a bargained outcome. We try it, we see what happens, we’re certainly not discouraging teams from having a 3rd QB, and if we have to, we go back to the players and talk about it if it doesn’t work.

Q: Is there a video game on the horizon? And is CFL Week coming back?

RA: It is something we’ve been constantly talking about. One thing we are going to do is inviting our 14 global partners to create a global game. That could hit 800-million people and could you imagine the Riders playing a team from Frankfurt? One thing we’re doing to further this talk is to establish a vision for what an international set of rules would look like. We’ve talked with coaches and it would be very hard for an 11-man coach to adapt to 12-man. We’d want to play on our wide field because it makes the game so wide open. The motion needs to stay in. The other experiment is with safety and seeing if we can reduce the amount of head-to-head contact for linemen, playing in a 2-point stance rather than 3-point stance. The study has come back and revealed some interesting facts. The neutral zone increases contact so we’ve discussed junior players playing with a 2-point stance and eliminating the neutral zone. It’s fun to dream long-term about what we might do but we are for sure talking with our partners about designing a game, and how it would look.

As for CFL Week, it’s still on the table. Last year we had the Montreal situation and the CBA talks. We didn’t eliminate it, we just put a pause on it. We just didn’t have time at the end of the year to do a CFL Week for 2020 but we’ll start the discussion up and see if we can put one together in 2021.

Q: Will the CFL ever make salaries public?

RA: I struggle with it a little bit because I don’t think any of you would want your salary published in the newspaper and if we were ever to do it, it would have to be done in conjunction with the players. There are issues of privacy and those things. We haven’t had a conversation about doing it.

RP

(Photo: Taylor Currie)