| Toronto Argos To Join the NFL? |
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It’s becoming pretty damn obvious right now and should be to any Argos fan worth his salt that the management have already buried the team this season and are looking to commit to radical acts of change. I’m not just talking about switching out the major players, because they’ve done that already in their seeming quest to bury the Argos in the bottom of league. John Avery is nowhere to be seen and Damon Allen is now spending the last quarter of games either hiding or covering up for the obvious lack of talent that has been given flesh in the name of Mike McMahon. The Argos are like the invading zombie horde, gray and boring and every time another one goes down to injury, another one pops in their place. But this time, it’s a new breed that they are using. The Argos appearing to be replacing their entire roster with ex-NFL players. With the recent signing of Rashaun Woods, late of the San Francisco 49er’s to the practice roster, the Argos are slowly filling their ranks with more and more former NFL stars who flamed out of one league badly and are now looking for redemption north of the 49th parallel. The Argos may not have set a precedent when they drafted Joe Theisman or acquired Doug Flutie but they certainly set the barrel rolling down the hill when they figured that signing noted pot aficionado Ricky Williams would be a smart way to sell tickets. Rickey Williams Willie Pile Steve Christie John Avery Jonathan Brown Arland Bruce Dave Costa Ronald Flemons Patrick Johnson Riall Johnson Mike McMahon Bashir Levingston Adrian Mayes Jermaine Mays In the end, over half the roster has spent a significant amount of time on an NFL roster in one form or another. If this continues, we may see even more the active roster with NFL experience and the ever-growing possibility of the Argo-zombies taking over to an even greater degree and slowly taking the good ship out the CFL and establishing ground in the NFL. Whether or not this is a good thing, I can only begin to hazard a guess. We saw what American expansion into a Canadian Football League did and I would think that the reverse would probably hazard the same result. Failure. But these frequent signings of NFL talent leads me to wonder when the CFL is going to abolish the import rule altogether and just open up the league to talent of all shapes, sizes and countries of birth. Hey, I’m Canadian, I know that it’s the import rule that makes the CFL special, but the CFL is looking weaker and weaker by the day. Patriotism will only get you so far and admittedly, it does less for the bank balance than we like to admit. With the CFL leaning more towards trying to achieve the kind of big hits and swift action that the NFL has been known to deliver, eliminated weaker Canadians in favor of better American talent and you’ll have a faster game, nastier hits and the sort of things that drive fans and ad revenue to a game that is becoming increasingly anemic. More on this later this week. ---             |