The festivities for Sunday’s Grey Cup battle between Saskatchewan and Winnipeg includes appearances by the Barenaked Ladies, Loverboy, April Wine, Lenny Kravitz, Trish Straus and Dan Ackroyd. Haven’t our friends in Canada suffered enough? To hear commissioner Mark Cohon explain it, the CFL oughta get territorial about any encroachment on the part of the Bills or any other NFL club. From the Globe & Mail :
“All of the tea leaves are indicating that it’s shifting,” Cohon said Friday morning. “You have guys like Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum and Phil Lind, very powerful Canadians who are interested, you have an owner in Ralph Wilson in Buffalo who has said, ‘When I die, my estate will sell the franchise,’ you have the Bills interested in marking Toronto as part of their territory, which I believe is indication that, ‘Hey this our territory, we don’t want another NFL team coming here.’
“So I think there’s all these things lining up as an indication that it could happen. So, I’m not sticking my head in the sand, that would be the worst thing for the CFL commissioner to do. So I think there’s a real potential.”
Speaking at his first state of the league news conference, Cohon says an NFL team in Toronto would threaten the CFL in Southern Ontario, a key region for the league.
Cohon hopes that should the NFL bring a team north, it will do so in partnership with the CFL.
The commissioner also says expansion to Ottawa is on the plate, but not imminent.