Rich

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.

Let's discuss a few things from people claiming the Bombers will never pay a dime back to the taxpayers. There was a 3M profit this year. There was 1M paid for severance packages. When the new TSN deal kicks in, the Bombers are estimated to make an additional 2M from that. So far we are up to 6M profit, lets use that as revenue / profit streams going forward. Lets not even factor in reduce transit costs next year, and lets assume also that the sale of the new corporate seats of whatever they are that Lawless is talking about offsets any reduction in season tickets. Lets also ignore any one time costs we paid last year for the moving and opening of the new Stadium. So, based on what we know, the Bombes are allowed to sock away 500k before making their mortgage payments. That leaves 5.5M that they can use to payoff a 4.5M payment. So thats an additional 1M that can be used for increased operating expenses (more coaches, cap going up, etc). Lets also not factor in revenue from events like the soccer game that was just played, concerts (this would offset year to year from what they made on them last year), NHL outdoor games, Grey Cups, etc. Lets consider those gravy and to be used to stabilize income year to year when they team has good years and bad. Even if we had to make a payment this year, while we wouldn't be able to make the 4.5M payment ,we would still be able to pay 2.5M. In 10 years from now, assuming season tickets and concessions revenue continue to rise year to year, that 4.5M a year payment isn't going to look too bad at all. Did the Bombers get a sweetheart deal to get the stadium built? Yes, absolutely. Are they going to be able to make payments towards it? Yes, absolutely. Maybe not as fast as some people would like, but payments will be made.