CFL is pretty big in western Canada, right?
It’s as popular as soccer here. No really.
I’ve been to Shellbrook (my brother lived there briefly) and it seemed pretty sparse to me. It’s home to Frodo’s Family Restaurant, though.
Holy crap! You are correct, aside from the score (26-10 Ottawa, actually). :smack: My tired old brain got the score backwards. So I guess Smilin’ Hank and company did just fine.
Leaffan, yes the CFL is big in the west. I could go on a big rant about how frustrating I find Toronto’s lack of interest in their perennial CFL contender, but that’s probably almost a separate thread unto itself. 
You’re right about the score - fat-fingers on the iPhone, apparently.
The Argos were quite popular at one time, and I remember going to a number of Argo home games where the stadium was full (or seemed to be). I’m not sure how, but somehow the NFL got more popular there.
penis-envy 
If you’re “world-class” (in your own mind at least), you look down on local institutions.
The Blue Jays arrived.
No, really, look it up; the Argonauts never drew better than 1976, the year before the Blue Jays arrived in town. After the Blue Jays won the World Series, Argos attendance collapsed and never recovered. Sure, there was hockey, but that’s a Canadian thing, there’s always hockey; we consider it a right. The arrival of big league baseball began to orient the Toronto sports market towards all true big league sports; rather than just being a hockey town, Toronto had become a member of one of the big American sports leagues (and of course would later become a member of another.) So Toronto fans began to think more in terms of the entire major league sports market - which, I have to say, doesn’t include the CFL. There’s nothing wrong with the CFL, but it’s not the best football. The NFL is. That’s just the way it is.
Sports compete with other sports, not just with teams in the same sport, and a perceived minor league team will always struggle to succeed in a major league market. Having the CFL in Regina - a city smaller than some of Toronto’s suburbs - is one thing, because it’s literally the biggest game in town, or that there will ever be. In Toronto, it’s not.
So to sum up, Northern Piper is correct.
In your opinion. Not everyone agrees with you.
Your and your husband disagree, okay.
I’m sorry, but in a very objective sense, it is not my opinion, it is fact. The NFL is the highest calibre of football played in the world. A CFL team, asked to play a season against NFL teams, would lose every game by fifty points or more. An NFL team, asked to play a season of games in the NFL, would go undefeated and would probably score over a thousand points and give up fewer than five touchdowns all year. The average score would be something like 79-2, possibly constrained only by the sportsmanship of the NFL team no longer trying after establishing a huge lead.
Now, you can point out that some people enjoy the CFL more and obviously that is true and not at all incompatible with it being inferior football. That’s not how I see it, personally - the difference in talent is too great for me to get over - but that’s just MHO and it’s perfectly valid to see it the other way. Some people enjoy OHL hockey more than the NHL. Many people in the USA are vastly more interested in college sports than pro sports, though clearly the college players are visibly inferior (all the largest football stadia in North America are NCAA stadia, not NFL or CFL. And they sell out.) But the NFL is a way, way, way better calibre of football, and it’s not a close call. And that’s why Toronto fans have lost interest in the CFL. It’s a minor league, like it or not.
Now, what I really don’t understand is why anyone would have a problem with that. If people aren’t interested in seeing the product, so what? People in Regina love the CFL and people in Toronto don’t. That’s a matter of simple consumer preference. To use another sport as an example, I think it’s now blindingly obvious that hockey in Sunrise, Florida is not going to work out in the long run; the Panthers have terrible attendance even if you believe their ludicrously inflated figures. But geez, that’s not the fault of people in Sunrise/Fort Lauderdale/Miami, is it? If they don’t like hockey, they don’t like hockey. You can certainly question the intelligence of the people who thought a team in Sunrise was a good idea, but there’s nothing wrong with someone in Sunrise not wanting to spend time and money seeing a lousy team play a sport they aren’t into. I’ve been to a Panthers game and the people who DO go are passionate fans, but there just aren’t many of them, and that’s fine. Hockey is not a Florida sport.
IMHO, sports teams get precisely the attendance they deserve and blaming the local populace for disinterest is kind of weird. It’s like a failed restaurant blaming the locals for not buying their food; it’s your own damn fault if your restaurant fails, or it’s just bad luck, or whatever. Nobody owes them their business, though.
The talent level in the NFL is unquestionably better. The CFL game, however, is superior in every other way.
I also have to disagree with your theory about the Blue Jays causing the drop in attendance for the Argos. There is at least as high a correlation between the Argos’ win-loss record and attendance as there is anything to do with the Jays. Seasons where the Argos win have generally produced an uptick in attendance while long runs of inept performance have resulted in significant drops. Yes, there was a big decline in Argos attendance when the Jays won the World Series; the Argos also finished in 4th place in '92, 4th in '93, 3rd in '94, and 7th in the expanded league in '95. And attendance jumped by almost 4,000 in '96 when they won the division and the Grey Cup. They’ve been over 30,000 in attendance twice in the last decade, both years when the team finished first in their division. The fans have consistently not come back after long winning droughts, however, and that’s something I can understand and even appreciate because it means the fans are voting with their dollars and don’t want to pay to see their team get beat (this doesn’t explain persistent sellouts to see the Leafs, however).
And it’s not like Torontonians are choosing the Jays over the Argos—the Jays have been in the bottom half for MLB attendance figures in all but one of the last 15 years.
The CFL as a whole went through a terrible upheaval in the late 80s and early 90s, and I think all of the teams (except the Esks) suffered erosion of their fan base - to the point that in 1993, I remember concerns that the CFL might not be around in 1994.
The CFL management have referred to that period as the “lost generation” - the teams generally lost a huge chunk of their dependable fans, and then had to spend the next fifteen years trying to win them back. That was easier to do in the smaller markets, for the reasons RickJay mentions.
However, it’s not impossible, as the Als showed, by a counter-intuitive strategy - move to a smaller stadium to expand the fan base. Playing games in a cavernous stadium that’s only a quarter filled is depressing, for players and fans. That’s one of the reasons the Argos have considered trying to get a new, smaller stadium built.
I agree that the Blue Jays are a much bigger draw in Toronto, but I’m not sure I’d say they “collapsed and never recovered”. For instance, in 1990, the Argonauts averaged 32,000 spectators per game which is comparable to the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ attendance in 2012, say; the only team with better average attendance figures in 1990 was Edmonton.
They have little choice, as they are being kicked out of their current home in 2017.
There is a perfectly functional stadium at BMO Field, where the soccer team plays, but for whatever reason this can’t happen unless the federal government pitches in part of the renovation cost (apparently it will take $120 million for the Argonauts to play there - one wonders if you couldn’t just build a damn stadium for that) and, of course, the rich corporations that own the teams don’t want to pay for their facilities themselves. They want the taxpayer to foot some of the bill because, hey, free money.
Saskatoon berry season has just started again in Toronto! The city of Toronto has graciously planted a bunch of saskatoon berry (serviceberry) trees in my neighbourhood, and nobody around here eats them except for me.
Remember I commented a while ago that I was worried about getting my backyard sump pump going?
Take a look at the Riders - Ti-Cats game to see why. The roads around Taylor Field are flooded and the rain is still pouring down.
That’s what we’ve been dealing with for the last two weeks.
There’s a lot of people in the stands wearing yellow, but I don’t think they’re Ti-Cat fans. 
I’m back in front if the TV. Just wet-vacced 60 gallons out of my basement. 
Back again. In addition to the backyard sump pump, I’ve got a submersible pump running from the lawn in the backyard.
Yes, a submersible, which requires the pump to be sitting in at least an inch of water. It’s been running for about half an hour now and is showing no signs of stopping.
Plus more wet-vac work in the basement.
At least the Riders are doing well: 31-3 at the end of the 3rd.
Wow. Is this primarily precipitation, or snow melt? After all, it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Now, there’s a real fan! Pumps are running, but still managing to keep up with the game!
(Seriously, NP, hope everything turns out OK with the water problem.)
Watching the game myself–Hamilton just scored a TD.