Rich

It is over 1/2 million dollars per year.

Actually, David Asper and Brock Bulbuck spent $500,000 of the Bombers' money to maintain full control over the Board. Shame on the BOD for allowing their personal issues to cost the club this much money. Or the BOD spent $500k to not give in and play Katz' game of crony politics.

According to Wikipedia, this is the reason Joe Louis was called the Brown Bomber: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Louis I'm mixed on the Redskins name. Is it racist? Probably, however it doesn't conjure images of racism in my mind when I hear it. It conjures images of a football team. Not sure how native americans feel about it. How long, or is it much of a stretch that this gets extended to the Bombers, who are essentially named after a racial slur on Joe Louis? What about the Eskimos?

Interesting read from Drew Edwards here http://scratchingpost.thespec.com/2014/05/cflpa-gave-away-the-thing-they-want-most-revenue-sharing.html

Deleted a few posts in this thread. Let's try to keep this on topic and not devolve into racial slurs and what may or may not be common place.

Assuming it happens, anyone planning to attend this year? BLUE BOMBERS 2014 TRAINING CAMP OUTLINE WEDNESDAY, MAY 28 ? FRIDAY, MAY 30TH (ROOKIE CAMP) Wednesday, May 28 Practice: 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Thursday and Friday, May 29 - 30 Practice: 2:05 p.m. - 4:05 p.m. SATURDAY, May 31 Veterans report to camp for physicals and meetings. The Bombers are scheduled to practice the following days/times. Please note, this is subject to change. SUNDAY, JUNE 1 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. (second practice begins at 11:05 a.m.) MONDAY, JUNE 2 7:50am - 12:20 p.m. TUESDAY, JUNE 3 7:50am - 12:10 p.m. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4 7:50am - 12:20 p.m. THURSDAY, JUNE 5 7:50am - 12:30pm FRIDAY, JUNE 6 7:50am - 12:10 p.m. SATURDAY, JUNE 7 TBA SUNDAY, JUNE 8 1:30 p.m. - 4:05 p.m. MONDAY, JUNE 9 Toronto Argonauts at Winnipeg Blue Bombers, 7:30 p.m. CT, Investors Group Field (680 CJOB, TSN) TUESDAY, JUNE 10 3:00 p.m. - 5:20 p.m. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11 7:50am - 12:20 p.m. THURSDAY, JUNE 12 7:50am - 12:10 p.m. FRIDAY, JUNE 13 Travel to Calgary SATURDAY, JUNE 14 Winnipeg Blue Bombers at Calgary Stampeders, 7:00 p.m. MT, McMahon Stadium, (680 CJOB, TSN2) SUNDAY, JUNE 15 Travel to Winnipeg (no practice) MONDAY, JUNE 16 3:10 p.m. - 5:20 p.m. TUESDAY, JUNE 17 7:50am - 12:10 p.m. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18 9:40am - 12:10 p.m. 7:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. (mock game)

Darren Cameron @Darren_Cameron · 8m 2014 #Bombers rookie camp to open Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. Thursday and Friday practices begin at 2:05 p.m.

The owners would sign this deal in a second if the players agree to no cap tied to revenues.

Read the transcript and decide ... http://deadspin.com/exclusive-the-extended-donald-sterling-tape-1568291249

Healthy is relative in the CFL. If you look historically, healthy means not losing money, breaking even, and making a small profit. They also reportedly have the books on 7 of the 8 teams. Why don't they talk about the profitability directly of last year? The leagues profitability fluctuates too much to look at a single year, a single statement in isolation. This one bothers me. As we've seen in Winnipeg, being forced to skimp on other areas of the operation can cause an inequitable playing field in terms of less coaches, less appealing travel in terms of attracting FA, etc. Other then the big 4, other sports don't have a cap tied to league revenues. The CFL is not to the same scale as the NBA, MLB, NFL, or NHL. Their revenues are so huge that basic costs like travel, coaches, trainers, per diems, etc don't affect their bottom lines like they do Who cares about revenue. Profitability didn't rise nearly by that much. All this in a year where we weren't able to make a mortgage payment. With a new stadium comes new costs as well. This is where tying a cap to revenues is problematic. And making that assumption is just plain wrong. They are different markets who have had problems being profitable in the past. So much so that Ottawa has folded ... twice. Again, the CFL doesn't experience the same economies of scale as the other leagues so why bring it up. It is an Apple's to Orange's argument. You report based on 3 of the most profitable teams, or half the league. Give us the numbers on how your proposal affects the bottom half of the league because really the CFL can't afford to lose a single franchise. Maybe not this year because that revenue isn't factored into the numbers yet, but it certainly will next year. I think the CLFPA is still a bit out of touch on their expectations. At least their % of revenue ask seems to have come down to a realistic numbers. Still don't think the owners will go for it in the long run. Good news that they are getting back together on Wednesday.

I would trade Buff now if you can get a decent return for him. Especially if he ends up offing on the 3rd line next season. A man that big who reportedly isn't the biggest fitness fanatic will experience a sharp decline in his play. I'd rather that happen on another team if we can get a decent return for him now.

This "2 new active roster players" thing is being misinterpreted by a lot of people, fans and players alike. There are no new costs associated with the 2 new roster spots, they're simply expanding the game day roster from 42 to 44 and decreasing the size of the reserve roster from 4 to 2. It's still 46 game cheques being handed out (the players on the 4 man reserve get a game cheque too) it's just that teams can now dress 2 extra players instead of paying them to stand in civvies on the sideline. Do you know if those guys travelled with the teams last year? If not, there would be a minimal cost increase to the clubs for this on travel.

This is somewhat true. Some of the guys can and do pickup a part time job with the offseason whether it is in sales, trainers in gyms, etc. Also, the ones making the league minimum are usual in the 20 - 25 year old age. If you were in that age range and were told you could get paid 45 - 50k per year to play professional football 6 months of the year, have 6 months off to dedicate to training full time, all for a chance to make it to the big show, would you take it? Sometimes it is Risk vs Reward.

I don't want a covered stadium. Nothing beats sitting outside on a summer Friday evening watching Blue Bomber football. I will gladly suffer through the couple of really cold games we get to be outside in the summer for most of them.

I've had varying feedback on the News Feed section. Some people use it to get their news, others ignore it and just go to the newspaper sites themselves to read the news. I will throw this out there as an option. The news articles are just an RSS feed that the board takes and converts into forum posts. I could just as easily add a new area (maybe under the new content box on the main page or under the Twitter feed in the forums) that has links to the articles and if people want to talk about them they could post topics on the main board.

Agree with most everything you say, but been doing some reading today on 2010 when the last deal was signed to see if I could find any mention of why revenue sharing was taken out. Found this which answers why revenues are the players business. http://www.cfl.ca/article/cfl-cflpa-announce-new-4-year-cba And from the actual agreement (http://www.cflpa.com/Collective%20Bargaining%20Agreement%20June%2016%202010%20(E5788660).pdf):

Looking at that stadium again with that one section wide open, wonder what effect that will have on the wind in a late fall game

Agreed, it is a very nice looking stadium. Wish them luck with the construction and hopefully don't go through what we did here in terms of delays, budget, wind, etc

Sneak Peek:

CFLPA posted this on their Facebook account https://www.facebook.com/proplayers.cflpa

Looks like they are following suit like the Jets did http://www.bluebombers.com/ticket-card-getting-started

I'm not a labour law expert by any means but I always thought you could bring in employees from other countries if you can prove that the need is there and the local expertise is not sufficient. If this were true how could we have any imports at all? There are Canadian players available, they are just not at the same talent or expertise level of their American counter parts.

I'm willing to bet that if the league goes to replacement players they will waive the NI rule. And if I am a Canadian player, that is the one tactic that would make me sign a new agreement.

I've been working on getting the Twitter feed back up and running. It would be nice to have it back up for the season. The last time I tried this, it broke the site for a bunch of people using Internet Explorer. I think I've found a way to get it to work, but am limited in the versions of IE that I can test with. So, I'm trying a controlled approach to see how it goes. I've added the Twitter Feed to the News Forum. If people could take a quick check there http://morningbigblue.com/community/forum/40-news-feed/ and let me know if they have any issues. If all goes well, I can roll it out to the rest of the forums.