HALIFAX — The Boatmen looked very much at home at St. Mary’s University, as the Toronto Argonauts rolled to a 31-13 win over the Saskatchewan Roughriders at Touchdown Atlantic.
The Argos played well, but it was a boring game, Let’s look to two other teams to play next year in Touchdown Atlantic.
Yeah. Weed out the weeds.
I’d stick a ‘2024 Touchdown Atlantic’ sign up at St. Mary’s University that reads, “Only CFL teams that were playoff finalists from the previous year will be considered. All others need not apply.”
Not a bad idea, but if the idea behind this game is to expose the eastern fans to the CFL, then the league should just rotate in teams that have not been down that way in some time. Either way - yesterday’s game was not an entertaining one.
I think one reason they like having Toronto in the game is because of Toronto’s bad home attendance.
The game is a money loser so not sure who picks up the tab for it. Is it split between the CFL and MLSE?
I would think that MLSE would be the only owners that would be willing to play in front of 10,000 fans and even if they charge $100 a ticket they are losing money.
Good for the Argos for being 6-0, but except for the win against BC, they have been playing teams playing less than 0.500. And why does the schedule have Toronto playing Hamilton 4 times this year with only 1 game against Winnipeg??? Also, they play 8 games against 3 Eastern teams (traditionally the weaker conference) and only 7 games against 5 Western teams. The scheduler must cheer for the Argos, they must. How else do we explain this lop-sided schedule???
But ALL teams in the CFL are less than .500 except the Bombers and Lions, and like you say they did beat the Lions who are over .500
ALL Eastern teams play eight (not seven) games against the West this season. Toronto is fortunate to play Wpg and B.C only once; last year they played Wpg and Edm only once. There’s no specific rationale available for how the “only-once” teams are chosen but I highly doubt it is because of the schedule-maker rigging it on Toronto’s behalf. One could argue this year that the schedule-maker must favour Wpg and B.C. because neither team has to face the Argonauts twice.
Row to victory? More like ‘paddled’ the Riders.
However you look at it that’s terrible scheduling. Toronto and Winnipeg should always play twice but especially this year. Whatever happened to the Grey Cup rematch game which used to be in Week 2 I believe? It didn’t happen last year either between Winnipeg and Hamilton. Toronto and Winnipeg also played only once last year. What are they thinking or are they even thinking?
And it would be funny it it turned out that Winnipeg and BC were lucky to face Toronto only once, which is possible the way Toronto is playing. Now the East would know how the West teams feel almost every year. Only about 25 more years to go and it can be called even.
The game was played in a market of 2.4 Million Canadians without a Canadian Football League team, created a buzz and brought millions of dollars into the local economy… Fits in with the marketing push by the CFL and I am guessing that the CFL pays the difference in this investment.
Yes check out the last page 14 of the attachment - it breaks down the revenue/expenses.
The CFL or the Argos won’t make any money out of it but local businesses will always gain. Since most of the hotels were full it probably means that most fans came from out of the province,
Great info. Looking forward to when the new numbers come out. Those expense numbers should drop quite a bit as the game was an hour outside of Halifax. It would be scary to see what the bus shuttles to that game cost. 
Also I wonder what the asterisk is for in the section for visitors who attended the game. Last year’s out of town fans were 7k. It wasn’t a great selling point for Haligonians as the game was an hour outside the city. Lots of ticket resales when the venue was changed. I would like to see more info in this area. Out of town numbers should change quite a bit this year, although there were obviously alot of fans from other parts of Canada.
The economic impact for TDA 2022 was released last October so I’m guessing the same will happen this year.
The economic impacts are always estimates/guesses. They look at how many hotel rooms were filled but they don’t really know if the guests were there for the football and then they estimate the average someone would spend on meals drinks etc.
Any extra event for a city is good for the local businesses.
Halifax does alright with their new world class convention centre, I would imagine that a few conventions bring in a lot of money to the bars/restaurants/hotels too.