TORONTO WANTS THE NFL (AGAIN)

There's NFL-coming-here talk in southern Ontario yet again, and well we have heard this before, it seems to be semi-halfway serious. You have the two biggest sports operators in the country collaborating in Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum.

So basically, it involves: Hoping that a) the New Orleans Saints have to move to avoid financial ruin; b) hoping that 86-year-old Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson drops dead soon; c) possibly ruining two 100-year-old football traditions, that of the CFL's Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

All of this is vulgar, and a bit a ghoulish, but that's Toronto for you. Yours truly is against the Bills being moved (as speculated about in today's Toronto Star), or forcing out southern Ontario's two CFL teams, but admittedly, those are only emotional arguments.

Resistance seems almost futile. If the Rogers/MLSE partnership has the cash and the plan, if there's political will at the NFL level to come to Canada, and if there's a franchise available and Los Angeles passes on it, then yes, Toronto joining the NFL is just a matter of when.

Here's a jumble of thoughts:

1. How much taxpayers' money at all three levels of government is going to get pissed away on this? The Star's Dave Perkins wonders.
2. Selling 65,000 tickets for each home game is not even a question. Toronto can't get enough of American culture, especially trendy American culture. Between the corporate sector, the people who are there for the spectacle, the high-rollers and the people who want to wow their clients so they'll be suitably impressed enough to buy some product or service they don't need, a Toronto NFL team would sell tickets. You might even get a couple hundred actual football fans out. Fancy that.
3. The money (average NFL franchise value: $898 million US) is there, although Rogers has said it doesn't have a billion dollars to put into a football team.
4. So if it's not a question of whether the market is big enough (Toronto would be the NFL's fifth-largest TV market), or having the capital, then it's a question of opportunity. Here's where it gets tricky.
5. What happens to the Argonauts and Tiger-Cats? Would one or both teams, with respective traditions dating back more than a century, have to leave the region?
6. One possible stadium solution would involve retro-fitting Rogers Centre to meet NFL standards, and building a more intimate 40,000-seat ballpark for the Blue Jays. (No one remembers this, but a plan for such a ballpark was presented back in the '80s, but by then, the powers-that-be were too far along on the Skydome plans.)
7. Lastly, the NFL says it won't expand again and it has only two teams, the Bills and Saints, who face the possibility of relocation. The optics of coveting either team are terrible, not that Rogers or MLSE could give a damn.
   
   The first is the New Orleans Saints. Perhaps the ravages of Hurricane Katrina will make it impossible for the Saints to stay in Louisiana, but talk about dubious circumstances to enter (or re-enter, in Los Angeles' case) the NFL.
   
   As for Bills, it stinks something fierce that, on the premise that a few thousand people cross the border for every Buffalo home game, that Toronto has any moral claim on a team that people in hard-done-by western New York have supported through thick and thin for 45 years.
   
   You can say that the Bills, located in North America's 49th-largest TV market, are to the 21st-century NFL what the Quebec Nordiques or Hartford Whalers used to be to the NHL -- an anomaly. Like those defunct hockey teams, they got into the league when it absorbed a competitor. (The Bills and Denver Broncos are the only charter American Football League teams that have stayed in the same city, with the same nickname.)
   
   The Bills are also anomalous in that their 86-year-old owner, Wilson, is a throwback to the days when almost all sports teams were sole proprietorships, rather than corporate entities. So what happens to the Bills depends largely on how long Wilson lives, and how he's structured his will.

Admittedly, the scope of the Rogers/MLSE partnership is massive, and sitting here on a sunny September day in 2006, there's no idea how big it's going to get. All that's certain is that for sports fans who have been teased and toyed with by either corporation over the past few years, the thought of them together brings to mind Carl from The Simpsons telling Frank Grimes how to deal with Homer being the power plant's safety inspector:

"It's best not to think about it."

As for the NFL and Toronto, time will tell if this is for real or idle speculation in the middle of a slow news week.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.