Another Mediocre Season?

You can smell it in the air; football season. The best time of year.

At the same time, however, it may well be the most challenging time of year for the CFL, with the passion of Labour Day behind us, and with both the NFL and the NHL either already into their season or getting ready to get rolling.

The last thing the CFL needs, you have to believe, is non-competitive football.

But that's what we got this past weekend. Four blowouts, four one-sided contests in which the winner got way ahead early and the loser was never even in a position to mount a comeback. Three of the four East Division teams - Toronto, Montreal and Hamilton - got whacked and whacked hard, illustrating what may be a significant imbalance between east and west this season.

Not one of last weekend's games, really, was interesting past halftime, other than to the joyous supporters of the teams administering the whippings.

Even worse, it wasn't a one weekend phenomenon.

Over the last three weeks of the CFL season, the average margin of victory has been 18 points, with only two of 12 games decided by less than a double digit difference.

With B.C. going into Saskatchewan and Edmonton heading into Montreal, perhaps next weekend will be different. Maybe Casey Printers learns a little bit more of the offence and creates some excitement for Hamilton against Calgary.

But right now, it's hard to shake the feeling that this CFL season is gradually becoming a lot like last season - lacking in competitive drama and individual excellence. Indeed, when Winnipeg quarterback Kevin Glenn left the game in Hamilton on Saturday night, it was mentioned that he was probably the east's leading candidate for CFL most outstanding player honors, and after a few moments, it was concluded he was really the ONLY legitimate eastern candidate this season.

Maybe it's different out west where B.C., Regina and Calgary have looked as good or better than any of the teams in the east.

But more weekends like last weekend aren't going to help the CFL make this fall magical for fans of the three-down game.

Friday Incompletions

My goodness, this Ryan Smyth story sure has some legs.

I have no problem with Kevin Lowe's decision. There just needed to be a slightly longer window between closing the door on the Smyth negotiations and the trade deadline so the entire matter seemed less rushed.

But if Smyth was looking at $5 million per season or more, you have to think the Leafs did a decent job getting Darcy Tucker under contract for $3 million a season.

If Smyth is the better player, Tucker is at least three-quarters as good, which makes the Leaf contract look pretty smart.

And while JFJ deserves all the criticism he's been getting over Bryan McCabe's inflated salary, he also did get Tomas Kaberle on board for $4.25 million per season, a bargain by NHL standards.

So if you believe McCabe got too much, you have to be willing to give the Leaf GM some marks for getting Kaberle and Tucker at good prices.

Other incomplete thoughts:

* After listening to McCabe get booed the other night at the ACC, you understand another level of smarts behind the Tucker deal. He'll never get criticized as overpaid, never get booed for not being worth the dough.

Moreover, people know Tucker could have got more elsewhere but wanted to stay in Toronto, and fans remember stuff like that.

* It's understandable that Jeff Garcia is a little cheesed off at the Eagles for letting him walk. But maybe Andy Reid just knows a one-time fluke when he sees one.

* It was fascinating to watch the Pittsburgh-Rangers game Wednesday night, the Pens first outing with Gary Roberts and Georges Laraque.

Roberts lasted about a period beside Sidney Crosby and Mark Recchi before being replaced by Evgeni Malkin and shunted to a line with Maxime Talbot and Colby Armstrong. That's a better fit.

Laraque, despite all the hype, looked terribly slow. Interestingly, while Crosby took an elbow in the head by Michal Roszival and Malkin was hit after the whistle by Colton Orr, Laraque was nowhere to be heard or seen. All this guy does is slow that team down.

* The 2007 NHL entry draft took a real slagging at the trade deadline when most of the teams seemed more interested in prying '08 draft choices out of the hands of opposition GMs than '07 picks.

* Damon Allen had to return to the Argos. He's still the best quarterback they have, and something tells me he'll be burning to bounce back in the fall. He's a solid bet for the Argos, particularly if his finger has been fixed properly this time.

* Curtis Joseph can't be the No. 1 goalie for the Leafs. But he'd be an ideal No. 2 man, and just might be the perfect player/coach/confidante understudy to Andrew Raycroft, particularly when it comes to playing in Toronto.

* You don't hear this much, but the reason the Oilers felt they didn't have enough to play Smyth was at least partially because they paid too much for Petr Sykora, Ales Hemsky and certainly oft-injured Fernando Pisani.

* Is it just me or are the Raptors a better team when Jose Calderon is in the game than T.J. Ford? That said, having two point guards who distribute the ball makes up for those years when the Raptors didn't have one.

* The tricky part for Paul Maurice about starting Andrew Raycroft in New Jersey on Friday and J.S. Aubin at home to Buffalo on Saturday is that if Aubin wins, wouldn't you have to go with the hot hand on Tuesday against Washington?

And then don't you have full-blown goalie controversy?

Limits on Largesse

The CFL now has a salary cap, which of course will come as a surprise to those who thought it had a salary cap before.

But let's not go over that comedy sketch again.

The new cap is slightly more than $4 million per team, and it comes with a host of new penalties for going over the cap or otherwise trying to find innnovative ways around it, plus league executives whose job it will be to make sure every team is in compliance.

This has produced different responses from different teams.

The Grey Cup champion B.C. Lions are owned by David Braley, who, along with Montreal owner Bob Wetenhall, voted against the new salary cap measures.

When the cap police showed up at the Lions' offices to start examining what the team's payroll looked like, they were told to get lost.

Nope, can't see our books.

Then there's the Toronto Argonauts. A conservative estimate is with the likes of Damon Allen and Ricky Williams in the lineup, the Argos spent about $5 million on players last season.

Obviously they had some adjustments to make.

That's why you've seen a host of established Argo vets booted out the door in the past week.

Antonius Bonner. Eric England. Clifford Ivory. R. Jay Soward. Keith Stokes.

Some, like Soward, were likely gone anyway on the basis of their play last season.

But some had to go so the Argos could replace them with younger, cheaper players next season that would properly position the club under the salary cap.

So the Lions responded one way and the Argos another. One senses that the cap is going to be a matter of some conflict in the coming months. This time, instead of pitting teams like Montreal and B.C. against a commissioner like Tom Wright, it's going to see those teams locking horns with other teams like Calgary, Toronto and Winnipeg.

Teams traditionally ignored the last salary cap too, until the league just gave up and decided to tell the world that what has been advertised as a a cap was actually a minimum.

It's likely the same abuses will occur this time unless swift measures are taken. With Wright officially history as of Jan. 1st, and no replacement in sight, it's hard to believe there will be the necessary leadership out of the CFL's head office to make the new rules stick.

For Sale: CFL's Soul

It's just wrong.

Wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.

That the CFL, according to a salesman in the front office, is officially willing to sell naming rights to the Grey Cup is a concept that tears at the very notion that this league and its traditions are pieces of unique Canadiana worth preserving.

I can see it now. Ben Johnson doing spots for the Cheetah Grey Cup.

This idea, of course, has been kicking around for a few years. Somebody named Gavin Roth, apparently the CFL's senior director of partnerships, just made the decision to go public with it and lend it some official weight yesterday.

You might think this kind of pronouncement might be left to, say, the commissioner.

Except the commissioner, Tom Wright, is on his way out. As we've seen this year with a number of issues, that's left the CFL with a huge vacuum at the top.

Having some sales guy come out in the middle of Grey Cup week and tell the world the league is willing to besmirch the legacy of one of this country's most revered sporting traditions by attaching some company's name to it just makes you want to throw up.

It smacks of desperation.

Roth tried to soft-peddle the idea by saying the Grey Cup is "a very sacred name" - not just sacred, but very sacred - and that the league wouldn't just sell naming rights to Joe's Garage or Meatloaf Express.

It would have to be an "absolute stellar brand." Like a beer company, perhaps? Oh yeah, and they'd have to be willing to pony up a lot of dough.

That means, just like the punchline to an old joke, the CFL has made it clear what it is.

Now we're just negotiating the price.

Someone needs to stop this and stop it now. Anybody with great affection for this league understands an enormous element in the CFL's appeal is it's history.

The Grey Cup is the ultimate symbol of that history, both good and bad.

Moreover, it's not named after a colour, for crying out loud. It was named in honor of a former governor general of Canada 97 years ago, and attaching a corporate name and sponsor to it would be akin to slapping a giant swoosh on the Peace Tower.

While we're at it, imagine the snazzy corporate logo you could fit in the middle of the Canadian flag.

See, this is less about being a CFL traditionalist and more about being a proud Canadian.

But with no new commish in sight, and with leadership sorely needed on a variety of fronts, including returning excitement and pizzazz to the game itself, it is more than worrisome that there is no strong leader dictating direction here.

And once the CFL sells its soul, they'll be no going back.

Now That It's Over

Remember back in the summer when Ricky Williams signed with the Argos?

Let's say Pinball Clemons had introduced him in the following way:

"Despite being a major ball carrier in the NFL, we intend to mostly let Ricky block. By the end of the season, you can expect that he won't have managed a single 100-yard game and will have crossed the goal line just twice.

"When we get to the Eastern final, he'll score once more, but he'll also cough up the ball on a crucial second half play. He won't be anything close to a star in the CFL, but he's a really nice guy and that's good enough for us."

Had Clemons uttered those words, he would have left the Toronto sport community totally mystified.

Isn't this pro football where only winning matters? You know, just win, baby.

But after the Argos bowed out of the playoffs yesterday, there was Pinball explaining the team's experience with Williams as an "unorthodox win" and well worth the effort and money expended in bringing him to Canada.

It's wonderful that the Argos love Ricky. But in the wake of the running back's underwhelming sojourn into three-down football, this sounds an awful lot like rationalization after the fact.

The Argos don't put nice people ahead of winning. They may have quality individuals in the organization, or many of them, but this franchise wants to win.

They're not in it for the participation badges.

Had the Argos known Williams would have such limited impact, they never would have signed him.

Indeed, had they known his offensive contributions would be so pedestrian and that he would have no positive impact on the gate - Argo attendance actually dropped fractionally this season - you can bet owners David Cynamon and Howard Sokolowski would have found better ways to spend money.

Otherwise, we should assume the Argos won't bother with college combines this off-season but will instead visit churches and yoga schools throughout North American searching out really nice, interesting, thoughtful folks to play for the team.

Look, it's quite possible Williams might have been able to do more with a team more committed to the run. Put him in the Alouette backfield in place of Robert Edwards, and perhaps Williams churns up the same amount of yards.

But it's also at least arguable that despite his talent he was ill-suited to the CFL game, or at least that he struggled mightily to adapt to the intricacies and unique challenges of Canadian football.

Had he been around for more than a year, the apprenticeship would have been worth it.

But he's gone. And while the Argos claim to have been thrilled just to have had the chance to spend time with the man, to most CFL fans he'll go down as just another Vince Ferragamo.

Heat's On in Hogtown

Who can remember a time when so many NFL teams were featuring more prolific and exciting offensive attacks than any CFL team?

Indianapolis, St. Louis, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego and Cincinnati are all more inventive and entertaining to watch right now when they have the ball than any team north of the border. You could probably toss New Orleans in there, as well.

Only B.C., and sometimes Calgary, have come close to consistently producing offensive excellence this season in the CFL. In the East Division, it's been three yards and a cloud of crushed rubber tires all season long.

That's not the way it's supposed to be. Comparing the two leagues is generally pointless because they are so different, but by tradition we have expected the CFL to feature teams with a greater appetite for putting the ball in the end zone.

Not this season.

In that light, the CFL has got to be hoping the five playoff games over the next three weeks produce some real fireworks.

In Toronto, meanwhile, the Argonauts are clearly facing more pressure entering the post-season than the other five playoff-bound squads.

In a matter of hours over the weekend, the Argos went from hosting the Eastern final to having to play the Winnipeg Blue Bombers next weekend just to earn the right to journey to Montreal a week after that for the game that will determine this year's eastern champ.

After the Argos lost to Saskatchewan and Montreal at home to end the season, it's an open question what the fan response will be for next week's division semi at the Rogers Centre. For a franchise that has a lot of tickets to sell for the 2007 Grey Cup, every game is a litmus test of this market's interest in all things CFL.

But if the Argos go down to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, it will almost certainly usher in an era of major personnel changes for the Boatmen.

Since winning the 2004 Grey Cup, the Argos have taken great pains to maintain roster stability, particularly on defence.

But a loss to the Bombers, a strong defensive team that at best will have starting QB Kevin Glenn behind centre but on the limp next Sunday, would signify a need for the Argos to revamp their lineup.

Offensively, this team has consistently under-produced for three years now despite having a lot of flashy names.

Defensively, there's nothing to complain about, really, but the group is getting older and the manner in which Robert Edwards churned for fourth quarter yards in Saturday's 24-20 Montreal win at the dome suggested an Argo defence that ran out of gas.

It bent and bent, but this time, it finally broke.

Winnipeg's Charles Roberts led the CFL in rushing this season and averaged five yards a pop against the Argos this season. If the Toronto defence can't control Roberts next weekend, it'll be a sure sign there's need for change on that side of the ball as well.

If the Argos get through this game, a lot of the pressure will be off as they head to Montreal and then, theoretically, Winnipeg for the Grey Cup game.

But they have to win next Sunday. More than Winnipeg or the two clubs playing in the Western semifinal, Saskatchewan and Calgary, the Argos are facing a must-win proposition.