Not much new, so get ready for another boring installment of um…. ah… er…. theatre.

The CFL is considering selling the naming rights to the Grey Cup. They’re hoping they can generate $10Million a year by doing it. Here’s why I think it’s a bad idea.

First and foremost, it cheapens your image, by proudly proclaiming to the world “We have a price tag on our dignity.” I think that much is obvious to anyone that pays attention to marketing. I hate marketing with a passion though, so maybe it’s more obvious to me than to others. (aside - is it possible to be more obvious? Is that like being more pregnant?)

The second reason stems from the fact that it’s been mentioned as potentially the difference between a team making money and a team losing money. I have a problem with that, but you’ll have to bear with me through one of my patented overly drawn out analogies.

Back when I got my first computer, a Tandy CoCo II, 64KB of memory was a lot. My second computer was a Commodore 64, and eventually I got a disk drive. The Commodore 64 disk drive was 180KB, if I remember correctly. We had awesome games to play, and lots of fun on the Commodore 64. Very few games required more than one disk, and I can’t think of any that required more than four (or two double sided disks) That’s 720KB. About the time I was really pushing my C64 to the limits, a game came out for the PC (Wing Commander?) that required something like 4MB of hard drive space, which I thought was insane. Eventually, hard drives got bigger and bigger, and cheaper and cheaper, until the average game comes on a DVD now and requires several hundred MB installed to your hard drive. Not too long ago, I was content with my massive 6.4GB hard drive, but now 40GB on the laptop seems constraining.

What I’m getting at is that if the CFL suddenly starts realizing this $10Million/year “windfall” and doesn’t clean up it’s act and be more fiscally responsible, then they’ll still be in financial distress, but now they’re also dependent on the whim of a corporate sponsor shelling out $10Million a year to keep them afloat. It’s a simple matter of economics. If your expenditures consistently exceed your income, you’re in trouble son. Does anyone here think that the Calgary Stampeders won’t take their cut of the $10Million and try to sign some free agents to improve their 4-14 record from last year? Not to single out the Stamps, because all the teams would do it, and within a few years, you’d see the league in financial distress again, except this time, they’re beholden to Bell, or Dofasco, or FritoLay or whatever crazy company comes out of the woodwork to pony up that $10Million. Now, they say “I only want to pay $5Million” Uh oh. The league is in trouble. Serious trouble. Costs got out of hand, and now they have to pay the piper.

If the CFL can’t manage their money now, adding another $10Million to their coffers will only exacerbate the issue.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Homer! Did you tell the mafia they could eliminate my competitors with savage beatings and attempted murder?” - Marge