STACKHOUSE’S 10 WEEKEND THOUGHTS

1 – CFL RESET – I’ve written about it a bit before but I think it bears repeating that I’m not at all in favour of losing the Canadian game and therefore I can’t support XFL partnerships, NFL Canada, etc. That’s not to say I think all is well with how the CFL business is run, but when you look at the grassroots of Canadian football, I feel that needs to be protected. It’s Canadian. It’s our heritage. While we have a Prime Minister set out on destroying the country (with relative ease and no push back), I would at least like us to try and keep our football. That means 3 downs, 110 yards, wider field, different goal post positioning, etc. The best way to maintain this uniqueness is to have a pro league that athletes from our country can strive for as an end goal.

2 – WHO RUNS THE LEAGUE? – I can’t believe these reports of MLSE dictating what goes on with regards to the CFL. Since when does your weak link make all the decisions? That would be like the Ottawa Senators running an NHL Board of Governors meeting. Not happening. How do those at the top of organizations in Saskatchewan and Edmonton put up with this? These are the gravy train franchises of the CFL. Any threat to their profitability should be defended with vigour and I just don’t see it. Maybe the CFL really does need to go away but when it comes back it should come back in exactly the same form of game play as it is now but with better leaders in charge of the league office as well as most of the teams. What I see is a dog’s breakfast. The league needs someone to just take the bull by the horns and go with it. If you are in, you are in. If you are out, have a nice life. Even if that means you are making plans for a Labour Day start to an abbreviated season and there are only six teams on board. Go with those six. Enough of this wishy washy non-communicative speculation.

3 – TV CONTRACTS – Does the CFL need Toronto in order to have a national tv deal? The answer is a resounding NO. If Toronto can’t draw flies to the stadium, what makes you think people in Toronto are watching on TV? A CFL without Toronto shouldn’t mean a thing as far as TV advertising and national corporate revenue is concerned. What good is promoting your brand in Canada’s biggest city if nobody cares?  A good sales person can drive this point home to sponsors in about thirty seconds. Get the team out of there and let MLSE do whatever they want and wish them well. If TSN thinks they are good with content and don’t want to broadcast CFL games if there is no Toronto, then wish them well too. A motivated sales staff could make CFL TV on the CFL website a profitable entity. Then you could televise things like the draft and run other interesting features fans are missing out in addition to the games themselves. People will pay if you give them something of value. Despite governments’ best efforts to suck the enthusiasm out of everyone, there are still lots of folks out there who will work for a low base provided there are financial carrots if you achieve success. So this shouldn’t cost a ton of money. You could also get creative and just mandate a $40 or $50 increase to all season ticket purchases across the league and give out CFL TV for free to those folks. My guess is there would be almost no blowback. There’s also technology to guard against password sharing, etc. If you don’t think big, you are destined to forever fail and there are more ways than ever before to succeed. You just have to want to. What I see is a professional football league in Canada that doesn’t want to.

4 – GET SPORTS OUT OF SCHOOL – I’ve wondered about a lot when it comes to sports in Canada over the last year and one of the things I keep coming back to is that we have a WHL, SJHL, etc in hockey but we have no such system in any other sport really. Football does have the CJFL but I think there is capacity for it to be much bigger than it is. Basketball, Volleyball, and Soccer really have nothing. There are some youth programs but once you hit high school, a lot of the best avenues for athletes are through school and not through actual clubs. Why don’t we have a junior basketball system that allows elite young people to play until age 20 just like they do in hockey in the pursuit of scholarships and a potential future as a professional in the game? Saskatoon has a pro soccer team on the way, the Rattlers are already set up in Saskatoon. The feeling I get from the education system is they don’t want to promote sports anyway so let’s get our athletes playing in front of professional coaches who are qualified to send them on to the next level. That isn’t meant to disparage the great volunteer coaches who are very giving of their time and have passion for the sports they coach but an SJHL or a WHL coach does that role as a full-time job. I think there is a future to do this in other sports.

5 – JETS – The Winnipeg Jets are the only NHL team I watch so I’m naturally going to comment mostly on them. Head Coach Paul Maurice said prior to Saturday’s game that Ville Heinola, Logan Stanley, and newly acquired Jordie Benn will all rotate in and out of the line-up down the stretch. The Jets, who have a glaring weakness on defense, seem to have five other immovable objects on their blueline which makes no sense to me. If they are as average (or below average) as we all seem to think, how can the other five guys all be untouchable? From what I’ve seen, Stanley is the one player I would never be taking out of the line-up.  He has gotten progressively better as the season has gone on. Heinola is precisely the type of offensive driving defenseman the Jets lack. I don’t know enough about Benn to comment but I have to think playing a game or two with Stanley, Benn, and Heinola all in the line-up together shouldn’t be all that far fetched. Their problems go beyond just a sixth defenseman.

6 – CANUCKS – You can’t argue against health and ever win but I’m going to do it anyway. The Vancouver Canucks are in sixth place and will miss the playoffs. They’ve been off for almost a month and the reality, for me, is they just don’t want to play anymore. However, they are using ‘health’ as an excuse to stay away from returning to play for as long as possible. Now, before you all attack me with typical ‘these guys had a serious disease and there are unknown long term health effects’, just remember that NHL players get optimum healthcare. Better than you and I. That’s why a couple of them got IVs; because they have easy access to it.  They would never get clearance if they weren’t healthy and there is too much money involved to send franchise players like Bo Horvat or Quinn Hughes out there if there was an unusually high risk in doing so. If this team was in first place by ten points, they’d be totally fine with 19 games in 32 days and accept the fact they’d probably lose half of them but would use the remaining games as a means to get sharp and be ready to go in the playoffs. However, J.T. Miller played the health and safety card and there’s nothing anyone can do once that happens. It’s like an employer who told me about a staff member who has had six Covid tests over the last year. It’s about health and safety so you can’t say anything, but who needs six tests in a year?

7 – RAY RICE – Remember him? If not, here’s a refresher: He’s the former running back for the Baltimore Ravens who was caught on video camera assaulting his girlfriend. The images were horrific and he, justifiably, never played again after the public saw first hand what he was guilty of. However, by no means is what Rice did the worst offense ever committed by a professional football player. You can bet if Michael Vick’s animal abuse was on video he wouldn’t have played again either. There was also an incident involving another player who physically abused his girlfriend and even threw her onto a couch that had a cache of loaded firearms. But, it wasn’t on video so the societal impact is minimized despite the fact that your human eye may have ranked both of the non-video captured offenses as worse than what Rice did. 

8 – WHICH BRINGS ME TO COVID – The news media will find the 25 year-old in hospital hooked up to a ventilator and leave all viewers with the impression that if you hug a police officer (those late to the party may not know a cop who hugged a protester has been suspended for this egregious act), this is the potential result. It’s inflammatory and not at all an accurate reflection of what is happening. The same thing is happening with vaccines. They aren’t dangerous but if someone does have an unusual reaction and a serious health outcome is the result, you can bet the mainstream media will be there to scare you. It’s how these trash outlets make their money and stay relevant. I wonder if I set a camera up in a doctor’s office and we witnessed each and every child that presents him/herself with health issues caused by narrow-minded government orders if we’d look at it differently. Most of us are touched by a good sob story and I can assure you there are no shortage of them when it comes to our youth but we don’t hold twice a week press conferences or keep a daily count on the number of kids making doctors’ appointments so it’s easy to just wreck everything in the name of Covid and then feel good about the fact we are ‘making a difference’. Side bar – what kind of people are we to proclaim holiness as we unsuccessfully protect the elderly and just as successfully destroy our youth while doing so? Have we done ANYTHING right over the last year?

9 – COMPLETE FAILURE – You know governments have failed when it comes to sports when even the CBC is critical. I came across a Tweet on Saturday night from Chris Wilson (Burlington ON), who says (in relation to Ontario’s most recent draconian and charter violating measures), “I am always stunned at the lack of importance politicians place on physical activity. Yesterday’s insanity takes this disrespect to the next level.  We need a wave of sport/health pros and athletes to run for office to change this. We should be using sport and physical fitness to improve mental health care costs and build an inclusive sport system for all that is the envy of the world. Activity should be helping us out of this mess, not parked indefinitely.” In my opinion, a big part of the problem is we have administrators sitting in sports offices right across the country who are not doing their jobs and not forcing the issue strenuously enough. While I’m sure there are back room conversations happening, the reality is that if that fight remains private and out of the public eye there is no pressure on governments to act. Some of these administrators are also too worried about what the public perception will be and forgetting that the people they represent would be fully behind them if they got tough and fought against most of these dumb Covid rules. I look at hockey as a perfect example. Social justice warriors who wanted less fighting, less head shots, less violence, less competition (i.e. – don’t keep score) and now less game play all under the guise of ‘safety’ are not people who actually even like the game let alone are people who will watch/play it. Sports officials have been duped by those who despise sports for a good long time.

10 – WHY – I’m probably reaching way out into left field on this one but I have wondered a couple of times over the last number of months if part of the reason why non-sports people hate sports so much is because sports is where you are most likely to find any alpha-male who hasn’t already been converted into a beta-male. Let’s cut right to the chase. Masculinity is endangered and now even frowned upon. The most likely place to find men who still have this personality make-up are in sports. If we can get young people to move off of sports as a primary interest, then there is a good chance they will also ditch some of their alpha-male traits and better integrate into the society the left is trying to mold. I think we have to be very careful in doing this, however. I look at the recent situation in the United States where a delivery driver was assaulted and killed in front of bystanders and nobody stepped in to stop it. We still need alpha-males and, clearly, none of those in the vicinity of that murder would fall in the alpha-male category.

*EDIT: CLARIFY – I’m not saying I think toxic masculinity is a good idea, and I was careful not to use the word ‘toxic’ but some of you have jumped from Point A to Point B very quickly so I will clear up any misunderstanding as I was maybe too presumptive on differentiating between the two. To me there is a difference between toxic masculinity and being an alpha male. I see alpha males as ultra competitive, more dominant in personality traits, and more assertive. When those traits are abused, it becomes toxic. Sports, in the past, has done a bad job of calling out and eradicating toxic masculinity but that doesn’t mean you can’t still promote ultra competitiveness or develop dominant personality traits that can be used for the good and I feel we still need those types of people. 

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