The Canadian Football League is finding that its venture into the United States is not resulting in all those good things its promoters predicted.
They have discovered to their astonishment that American team owners weren’t really interested in the advancement of Canadian football, but regarded the league as a possible stepping stone into the big-time National Football League of the United States.
The history of the rise and fall of splinter football leagues in the U.S. has been that money-making teams are gobbled up by the NFL and the losers are allowed to go bankrupt.
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Soon, many will look at practices such as seeding marginal acres to forage, growing cover crops and livestock integration and ask why they didn’t do this sooner.
The first thing American owners suggested was that CFL rules should be changed to conform with the American so they could use their smaller American football fields.The CFL refused. So, in one ridiculous instance, to extend the too-short American field, the end zone had to be sloped.When a fellow is running downfield looking over his shoulder for a pass it can be a bit distracting to find the ground rising under his feet.
Teams like Memphis, Birmingham and Baltimore are finding the future not bright, the first two due to lack of fan support and Baltimore due to possible competition from an NFL franchise in the same city.
Now there is speculation the CFL will shrink back of the Canadian border and we’ll once more have parity: We’ll import American pigskin grabbers, while the American teams in the National Hockey League import Canadian puck-pushers.
And we’ll all cheer for our home teams. Those are our boys out there. After all, we paid for them, didn’t we?
