CFL Commissioner Randy Ambrosie said he regretted that the league's request for $150M (all figures C) from the Canadian government "became the story" in the league's attempt to play this year. Ambrosie said, "We just should have focused on what it would take to get us back on the field." He explained, "We were counseled by some really smart people that know government relations to go in with this two years of 'if everything went wrong, here's how big our problem could be financially,' and that's where that $150M number came from." Ambrosie said, "We were feeling so much pressure to get to government and talk to them that we didn't include the players, and I feel like that was a mistake again that I have to be responsible for. ... Having them feel part of that process would have been better." Ambrosie on the season outlook for '21 said, "We're looking at a whole bunch of things that we'll do around a reset. We're going to look at how to work more together, and how we share resources amongst the nine teams. There's a project that's been underway for weeks on that" (“Overdrive,” TSN, 8/18).
WISHFUL THINKING: Ambrosie on Monday said that there are "better days ahead" for the CFL and insisted that the future "will be bigger and brighter than ever before." In Winnipeg, Jeff Hamilton writes Ambrosie "was selling the same things before the coronavirus temporarily shut down professional sports in mid-March that he is now, only this time the CFL is in shambles and bleeding even more cash." Ambrosie in his annual state-of-the-union address during Grey Cup week last November said that he "wasn't going to apologize for thinking big things for the CFL." Hamilton notes the CFL lost $20M in '19 -- at a time when COVID-19 "wasn't a contributing factor to the bottom line." The CFL was denied a $30M interest-free loan last week "not because the government didn't want to help them out," but because the CFL "wanted to dictate the terms of a loan they would struggle mightily to pay back" (WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, 8/19).
