Whoa whoa whoa, my friend… I am NOT an NFL fan, I couldn’t care less for that league. I’m CFL through and through when it comes to football. I made my post because there was a half-baked idea that the NFL would help the CFL but kill soccer, and I thought it was nuts. I don’t want the NFL in Toronto because I would fear for the Argos if it happened.
I don’t have much to say about baseball, only that the years where the Jays were major players in Toronto, '90-'93, very nearly did spell the end of the Argos. I was a little kid at the time in Toronto, and I barely even knew who the Argos were, everyone loved the Jays. What was it Stromboulopolous called us? “The lost generation”? The loss of these young fans contributed directly to the hardships that the Argos suffered in the late 90’s, early '00s.
I don’t see the Raptors in direct competition with the Argos. The sports are completely different, as are the demographics they target.
Arena league? Was anyone really worried about the arena league?
Now the NFL, there’s a different creature altogether. They would have several times the marketing budget of the entire CFL. The Argos will have their die-hard fans among the current and older generations, but come on, the young kids playing Madden all day in their rooms are gonna get sucked into the NFL circus.
Very quickly, to new football fans, the NFL team would be “good football” while the Argos would become “the off-season”, and in this business, it’s all about perception.
And about Toronto being a mediocre football town, don’t you also think we were a mediocre baseball town before the Jays showed up? How about a mediocre basketball town before the Raptors? A mediocre soccer town before TFC? Of course we were, and in just a few years, major league marketing has managed to pull a 180 in each case.
The Argos have had a long time to build in Toronto, yet according to you, it’s still a mediocre football town. Are you willing to bet the future of the CFL on the wild chance that the NFL will fail where MLB, NBA, and MLS have succeeded enormously?