Courtesy Edmonton Journal:

If the Canadian Football League is to survive the next 10 years — and I suspect it will — it will be no thanks to paranoid nationalism or sports welfare.

It won’t survive because Senator Larry Campbell, the former Vancouver coroner and mayor, got some silly law passed banning the NFL from entering Canada. Indeed, if the CFL ever gets to the point where it needs a law to withstand an incursion by the mighty National Football League, that will be proof positive the league isn’t worth saving.

Ditto if the league has to be sustained through government handouts, as the National Post’s editorial board recommended on Saturday. If it ever becomes the SFL (Subsidized Football League), write its obit. A sports league that must have tax-funded largesse is dead. Tag it and bag it.

No, for the CFL to survive, it must offer something the NFL never can — a connection with Canadian sporting fans’ souls. In that regard, Hamilton Tiger-Cats running back Jesse Lumsden and TSN president Phil King hold more of the league’s fate in their hands than probably even they realize.

The league needs a big-name Canadian-born player, someone to be this generation’s Russ Jackson, Tony Gabriel, Terry Evanshen, Joe Poplawski, Rocky DiPietro or Ray Elgaard. It needs a marquee talent to have been born in Vancouver, like Lui Passaglia, or Edmonton, like Dave Fennell, or Sheridan, Man., like Bill Baker.

And that’s where Lumsden comes in. The son of former CFL fullback Neil Lumsden was born in Edmonton when his dad was playing for the Eskimos. He played his high school ball in Burlington, Ont., and his college ball at McMaster University. He’s the kid next door, literally, and someone whose life experience Canadian fans can identify with.

We’re not likely to see too many Canadians as game-breaking NFL players. That’s a distinct advantage the CFL has over its southern counter-part and one it must exploit in its marketing if it hopes to give Canadian fans of football a vested interest in the league’s continuation.

I could give you a long list of why the CFL’s on-field product will never be as good as the NFL’s. The most devout CFL fans bristle at such suggestions, insisting our version of the pigskin game is far more exciting. But because three-down football does not permit sustained offensive drives like the four-down game does (nor does it require intricate defences to stop four-down offences), and because we will never be able to recruit the top U.S. talent, the excitement in the Canadian game is too often generated by mistakes rather than athleticism or strategic cunning.

Frequently the storyline of a CFL game goes something like this: one-two-punt, one-two-punt, one-two-… wait! someone’s missed a tackle/misread the coverage/ dropped the ball/thrown an errant pass and the other team is going to score!

But whether or not I’m right about the quality of our game is beside the point. Sports is entertainment. And what sells in entertainment is the sizzle, not the steak.

That’s where King comes in. His network, TSN, is now the television home of the CFL, having this year outbid the CBC for the Grey Cup. Just as TSN saved the league in 1997 with its $40-million contract for TV rights, and its expansion of the league’s broadcast offerings, this latest contract — $75-million for five years of exclusive rights to all television, including the Grey Cup — will raise the league’s profile and expand its viewer base, not by changing the game itself but by implementing a fully modern marketing strategy that will boost both the league’s bottom line and the network’s ratings.

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