Rich

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.

Got this in am email from CFL Field Pass

Correct. Petan needs to either make the big club or go back down to juniors. It is a shame because at his size, I don't think he will make the Jets next year, can see him needing some seasoning in the AHL to get used to a more physical game. But he doesn't have anything left to prove in juniors.

It is the same for me. Works on my phone. Hopefully Shaw pushes the updates soon. (And mts if it isn't working there either) The quotes in IE was a separate fix. Managed to find a patch for that a few days ago. Thanks all for your patience.

We should be back online. Was a fun night. Don't think I'll be doing this again anytime soon unless I absolutely have to. Let me know if you see any issues with the site.

I believe it is going to be 198.89.125.8

What am I supposed to do at work tomorrow? Work? It should be back up by the time you get to work. In the extreme case, it may take that long.

I'm going to be taking the site down around midnight tonight. I'm going to be migrating it to a new hosting provider. DNS settings are going to have to change and propagate throughout the web. This may take up to 48 hours. Hopefully the downtime is a lot less then that and when everyone wakes up tomorrow you don't notice any difference. But if not, this is the reason.

How does this money diversion scheme work? I'm not following. I could be wrong, but I think it's all about directing page views. Someone with more knowledge of how it works can probably correct me, but on websites, every view of a page with an ad on it = money. More page views = more money, so if a website is basically directing traffic to visit another website, it's all about creating as many page views as possible to maximize revenue. That's not the deal I was offered, but I think that's how what TUP is referring to works. Not quite page views, but add clicks. However, typically the more traffic you have, the more page views you get, the more clicks you get, so it works out to the same thing.

I thought only the first round was on TSN with the remainder on TSN.ca. Could be, I checked the guide on the TV last night, and thought it said the first two rounds. Either way, there is an hour of coverage, 7 - 8 I believe.

First two rounds will also be televised on TSN tonight. Don't remember it being televised before. Good to see the CFL draft getting a little more love.

Your projections are overly optimistic. How so? Are you disputing the reported numbers? We made a $3M profit in a year where we had transition costs to a new stadium, severance packages to pay, increased transit costs. It is a fact TV revenues are going up. We also had a horrible on field product. And while season ticket numbers were up, I believe we only had 2 sellouts last year. When is the last time this team made $3M in a year where we didn't host the Grey Cup? Show me your math.