Argos to BMO Field Won't Happen

That's not to say it can't happen, I'm just going to bet the farm it won't.

First, on the Canadian Football League. It has come a long way in the past ten years or so, emerging from a relative dark age of bankruptcy and ill-advised American expansion. It is our most important all-Canadian professional league, making the Grey Cup among the most important domestic trophies in Canadian sport, and it will be here for years to come.

Forget all the arguments about fairness, especially in relation to the FIFA U20 World Cup debacle in 2007, of which I think this takes the cake. And if you want the countless basic reasons why you will never ever see a touchdown at BMO, Ben Knight has them pretty much covered.

But the basic reason it won't happen is because some, or maybe all, of the people with the power to let to happen will eventually sift through the proposal, chuckle a bit, and realize how absolutely shithouse stupid it would be to cram in a CFL team in a soccer stadium, the same stadium these same councilors voted to have grass installed on the basis of providing Toronto with a nationally recognized, soccer-specific playing surface. All you have to tell any council rep, if it even gets to a city council vote which I'm pretty sure it won't, is that if the Argos move to BMO, they won't be playing anything even remotely similar to CFL football there, and neither will Toronto FC be playing anything resembling soccer.

Now, let's take a deep breath.

There.

Now some of us like to get our knickers in a twist about the idiocy of decision-makers in Toronto, and there is some merit there considering Mel Lastman, a racially insensitive furniture salesman, was mayor here for some time. But unless the CFL has a PowerPoint presentation that goes beyond trumped up whoppers, like the notion that grass pitches can be fixed up good as new within twenty-four hours, this idea will die a horrible death, maybe a slow one, but a death all the same.

Argos at BMO would kill two sports with one stone. CFL fans might not know it now, but they will when they sit down for the first time to watch a game that looks nothing like Canadian Football. That's after they've dealt with the ire of a grassroots soccer community for months on end, plus a prolonged media debate which will almost certainly side with TFC considering its success, fan base and relative financial stability in comparison to the Argos, a debate in which the general public will learn of how the Argos blew their chance at a stadium-sharing deal two years ago.

This is also after CFL's image gets dragged through the mud for bastardizing their own sport by killing another, but maybe before other CFL franchises protest about having to play in a non-CFL regulation field. Meanwhile, the Argos will have handily wiped out a huge area of growth, having forever gained an enemy Ontario's newest and heavily grassroots-supported clubs in the countries fastest growing and most popular participation sport. Few major backers will want to invest in the team that wrecked Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment's long-term plans for TFC at BMO, because no one in their right mind would want to be shitting in MLSE's backyard if they want a stable future in this city. The Argos take a huge step backward.

The optics don't just look bad on this one, this is a full blown case of cataracts. MLSE has to play the neutral, but even the CSA, who are already loudly protesting, couldn't mess up arguing this one. Call me naive, but the Argos are pulling a Hail Mary in the fourth quarter with one second on the clock, and they're throwing the wrong way.