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This is the week of the huge game, and hardly anyone seems to know or care.
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This is life, unfortunately, for the wayward and first-place Toronto Argonauts, a team at a time of massive contradictions and confusion in a Canadian Football League that needs them to succeed, not necessarily in the standings.
The Argos are in first place, and even Bill Parcells, who has always claimed that you are what your record says you are, might argue the point here. They don’t look much like a first-place team. They don’t feel like a first-place team. Honest, they don’t play like a first-place team — and if they beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at home on Friday night, they will clinch first in the East for the first time since Doug Flutie played quarterback here and the late Don Matthews coached.
That’s the football stuff.
That should be something worth celebrating if it wasn’t surrounded by so many questions that have no answers. Ryan Dinwiddie is the first-year head coach of the Argos. Most people wouldn’t recognize him if he walked naked down Yonge St. All season long, he has been falling out of trees head-first and landing on his feet. The Argos are 8-4 in this shortened CFL season, which looks great on the rookie coach, until you watch the games and see how he struggles with clock management and understanding the rules. All of that has happened with the accomplished Chris Jones on the sidelines not far from him. Jones probably should be coaching this team.
But that’s another story in a long tributary of stories surrounding the history, the future, and the inevitability of the Argos. The Argos can’t die, and they struggle to sustain. That doesn’t seem to change year after year.
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This team is owned by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, along with the Leafs, Raptors and Toronto FC. Mostly, they’re treated like a stepchild who was inherited but never really cared for. There is no promotion to speak of, little advertising, little selling of a team that lost the public years ago. MLSE shrugs, does nothing, spends nothing and goes about its day-to-day business of making money.
Too many people I know tried to buy Argos tickets, some for the season, some for individual games, and found difficulty in attempting to do was should be so simple. It was almost like there were internal roadblocks to selling seats. And if it wasn’t intentional, it was incompetence.
The COVID-19 restrictions are over at stadiums and ballparks in Ontario, but it doesn’t appear that way at Argo games where, I must confide, I own a pair of season tickets. The stadium is usually less than half-filled. The fans are too old and too white. The plan, when moving outdoors to BMO Field, was to reinvigorate the market and create the kind of atmosphere we see now in Hamilton or in Ottawa. Make it the cool place to be, the way soccer in this city has become the cool place to be. That buzz never happened.
At times, it almost seems as though MLSE is pushing the Argos toward some kind of extinction, which by itself is also an internal contradiction. Dale Lastman, Larry Tanenbaum’s right-hand man and board member of MLSE, is chairman of the board of the CFL. That would, you might think, propel the Argos higher up the priority chain in that corporate world, but when XFL merger talks were going on in the off-season, the Argos seemed the team most interested in altering their circumstance.
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Now, without the alleged merger, there’s no external evidence of MLSE doing anything to grow the Argos brand except hiring the beloved Pinball Clemons as general manager and the only face of the franchise anyone recognizes.
I asked an insider yesterday about the structure of the Argonauts. He put it this way: The president of the team, Bill Manning, who made his reputation in soccer and now has to deal with the mess that is Toronto FC, pays little attention to the Argos. The GM has a title, but no real football duties. His assistant, long-time CFL scout John Murphy, finds the players, but doesn’t necessarily consult with the coach on any signing. There are a lot of dots here, just none of them necessarily connected.
In a city starved for championships, the Argos have won no shortage of Grey Cups. They won in 2017 and in 2012 and, before that, in 2004. In total, they’ve won seven Grey Cups since the Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup.
The Raptors have one championship. TFC has one championship. The Argos win and we shrug our shoulders and go back to complaining about why Nick Ritchie isn’t scoring.
If this was a football town and coach Dinwiddie blew clock management, the way he did in the home game against B.C., the way he challenged a call that can’t be challenged the following game, that’s all we’d hear about.
If this was a football town, when the rather endearing McLeod Bethel-Thompson, a big-hearted quarterback you can’t help but cheer for, missed open receivers the way he has done recently, you would hear about it every day.
Instead, we hear nothing. Football silence. In what should be a football town. The old rivals, the Argos and Ticats, play on Friday night with first place on the line. There are still those who care deeply about this legendary team and follow them closely. There’s just not enough of them.
And in this week of clocks being turned back, more than anything else, that’s what the rather invisible Argonauts require.
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SIMMONS: The Argonauts can clinch first place in the East on Friday. But does anyone care? - Sherwood Park News
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