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I was studying the correlation between poorly attended Canadian Interuniversity Sports sponsored football games and Canadian Football League teams and getting annoyed, as I often do.

Last year, only 11 of the 27 CIS non-scholarship football programs playing the highest level of amateur football in Canada drew reported attendance numbers over 3000 a game.

(Some perspective is needed for American readers accustomed to the US top level of play for scholarship football at highly promoted programs like Texas, Tennessee, and Michigan that draw over 100K per game. Non-scholarship football in any country, including the US,  tends not to be taken seriously by fans and to be an attendance dud.  For non-scholarship, largely unpromoted and unmarketed football played in mostly badly thought out or aging stadiums or fields with bleachers in a cold country given to heavy snowfall,  an average of 3000 is actually pretty reasonable --- all things considered.)

Anyway, of these 11 "healthy" football programs, eight of them were located in cities with no CFL competition.

Of the 16 "unhealthy" programs, 11 were located in CFL "Killzones" --- areas where the CFL dominated the entertainment dollar of football fans.  (Of the remaining five, four universities had enrollments of less than 4000.  Again, something that seemed quite excusable.)

CFL fans frequently tell me that the Plains is a football hotbed.  And yet one would reach a totally opposite conclusion looking at CIS attendance.  The only CIS football program that draws over 3000 per game is The University of Saskatchewan located in Saskatoon.  Not coincidentially it is the only CIS team in a city in the Plains that doesn't have a CFL team.

CFL fans tell me how great it would be if the CFL would just expand into Halifax, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, and most of all Quebec City, because those cities have successful CIS programs.

It really doesn't sit well with me.  The universities in those cities have built some decent programs in a very disfunctional CIS with little guidance, structure, or support.  And now locals are supposed to jump aboard with the idea of ponying up the revenue to build a rich owner a $100 million stadium so that owner can steal the ticket buying fanbase from those local universities?

It just doesn't sit well with me.

I don't like the NFL, but at least they have the decency to find a market, get a stadium built, and then spend their money to train fans to go to that stadium.  They don't just find a popular college football team and take over their stadium like an avian brood parasite.

On days like today, inspite of my affinity to the players and the Canadian game in general and my sympathy to the long suffering fans of the CFL, I hope that league never grows.

Today, in particular, my thoughts went further down that path and I considered what would happen if the CFL's BOG once more ran the league off the road and into the ditch and AAA didn't come to bail them out.

No NFL or Canadian Government bailouts?

First, I'd like to admit that this is very unlikely.

Someone always bails out the CFL.  The CFL is like an armoured cockroach cruising through Vegas with a lucky rabbit's foot and weighted dice.  It's annoying, filthy, and disgusting at times, but it seems to have an unlimited amount of last minute pardons.

The CFL appears to effectively be the NFL's junior partner.  The NFL bailed them out and I have suspicions they would probably do so again.  In return the CFL stays out of the U.S. and let's the NFL do whatever they want in Canada.

This allows the NFL to retain plausible deniability while thwarting U.S. anti-trust laws that could cripple the NFL. "See, the CFL has been competing with us for years!"

When you consider the NFL lost their 1980's lawsuit to the USFL and if not for the business tactics the USFL adopted under the mavericky leadership of Donald Trump, the USFL might have been awarded over a billion dollars of the NFL's money (in 1980's dollars!!), it seems pretty likely that keeping a "competitor" around who doesn't really compete with the NFL is worth a handful of NFL millions every once in a while.

Even if the CFL caught the NFL at a bad time, Canadians love the fact that the CFL is homegrown and historic.  If it ever came down to it, I believe the local governments in CFL cities would champion a movement by the various levels of governement to save the league.

But what if it failed?

The idea really intrigued me.  What would happen?

The Years: 0-3 ACFL

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