One more week of training camp and one more week of pre-season games.
You always hear in the first two weeks of the season things like, training camp and or pre-season was just too short. The offence has not had time to gel yet.
It certainly makes sense to me that they have 1 more pre-season game. The training camp and pre-season schedule is not long enough to evaluate players, and truly get teams ready to play at a professional level. It generally means the first game or two are often stinkers.
This would allow each team to play every team in the East to play every other team in the East once in pre-season. I don't understand why we play the same team twice. How do you really evaluate if the opposition has a weak offence or defence, and you play them twice?
Also, with 8 teams in the league, why do we need to have 19 games in the season? That's kind of an odd number.
The big issue is which teams get the extra home game. Although, isn't this already an issue during the regular season. Acutally I just noticed we have 9 home games and 10 away games this year. Is that fair? I don't think so either competition wise or financially.
You’d think 2 weeks would be plenty though, in college they play no preseason games yet the teams always look in midseason form right out of the gates.
I always blamed the coaches for that in the CFL. Ron Lancaster, Wally Buono and Don Matthews coached teams always seemed to be ready teams to start the season. While a Paopao coached team would look like they’re still on vacation until about the 5th week of the season, at which point they’d kick it up into training camp gear.
Add a third week of camp and make the preseason games later in the camp. Make the roster cuts earlier as well so that teams are truly ready for game l.
Being a gate-driven league, owners would not want to be the odd-man out and lose an extra exhibition game gate to a competitor. That would not happen.
The scenario of no preseason games is likelier that three, IMHO -- but very doubtful.
In the NFL, teams that play in Hall of Fame game in Canton do play five games in the preseason (these berths are rotated). That is the exception to the rule. Unless the CFL comes up with a similar idea (e.g. a Hall of Fame game for the preseason), I doubt we'll see odd-numbered preseasons in the CFL.
Perhaps a third week of training camp, and a third pre-season game AT A NEUTRAL LOCATION (ie: London, Quebec City, Halifax, etc...) with the 2 teams and tle community splitting the proceeds. It would be a good way to expand the interest in the CFL.
This is the Touchdown Atlantic scenario we saw in Halifax a few years ago. As a one-off (the subsequent year was cancelled), it was a good experiment.
If the league were to hold four-neutral site games (one for each team), a three-game preseason schedule could happen. The question is finding enough stadia capacities in non-CFL cities to make those games economically viable. My take is that would be the exception, not the rule.
Two preseason games is plenty and people like Boomer Esiason have advocated for this in the NFL for a while.
And in some teams' case, even if you had 10 preseason games, like us last year, this wouldn't be enough to get "gellin'" as they say, don't think we ever got to that point last year.
Whoops, I guess I deserved that one. My bad. I was looking at the ticats.ca website and saw the schedule listed on it, and mistook the number on the left which indicates the week of the season for the game number.
I’m not smokin’ anything today, but maybe the heat is frying my brain.
What I like about the 2 games is no dilly dalling around, get set, ready and let’s play football that counts. I like Captain what you say about getting it together fast also, part of the entire skill set of what can make or break a season. They already pretty much well know the roster anyways after a couple weeks of practice, this is what Esiason argues, heck in the NFL they know the roster practically with all the mini-camps they have before official camp even starts.
Jesse found out he was more or less used as a body in camp, and that’s all, to give who was going to be on the team all the rest they need.
No. Keep it as it is. There's nothing more boring than listening to an exhibition game on the radio. If anything they should be televised so the fans have a better understanding of the team's evaluations.