So much for the age-old debate.
Will the National Football League ever come to Canada?
Case closed. It's here.
The announcement by the Buffalo Bills yesterday that they intend to play a preseason game at the Rogers Centre next year, and a preseason and regular-season game the season after that, is as clear-cut a statement of intent as can be imagined.
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In their release, the Bills describe Toronto as "the northern sector of our market," which effectively erases the international boundary as any kind of a barrier, and means that in the National Football League's eyes, any claim by the Canadian Football League or the Toronto Argonauts to territorial rights simply doesn't exist.
No need, then, to give the CFL or the Argos a heads-up as to their plan. Both were absolutely blindsided by the news - news that will, as an unhappy, surely unintentional byproduct, go a long way toward undermining whatever happy vibes they might enjoy when the Grey Cup returns to the Big Smoke next month.
Now, maybe you can go public with something like that in the NFL without the blessing of the head office in New York. Maybe this is a contentious, rebellious proposal, with the Bills going way out on a limb to further their own interests, only to be smacked down by the commissioner and the other owners.
But just how likely is that?
About as likely as the spin the Bills are putting on this announcement in Buffalo, the whopper that their real aim is to use games in Toronto to lure well-heeled Canucks into renting luxury boxes at Ralph Wilson Stadium.
That's the ticket: leaving the small, dying market for the big, rich virgin market down the road, in order to attract Canadian dollars back to Buffalo.
This is an incursion, pure and simple, a statement of claim, and a blueprint for the future. At the very least, the Bills are going to try and split their interests between two different cities, as the Packers once did between Green Bay and Milwaukee.
At most - well, on the death of 89-year-old owner Ralph Wilson, the ownership of the Bills will be in play; Larry Tanenbaum, one of the main movers behind a potential Toronto NFL franchise, has spent all kinds of time checking out the landscape in Buffalo and cozying up to Wilson; the team's current stadium lease allows the Bills to play as many as half of their regular-season games elsewhere; that lease expires in 2013, which would fit nicely with the timetable for constructing a new NFL stadium in Toronto; the Bills would need permission from local politicians to move those games, but also have an escape clause that allows them to walk away from the lease on a year-to-year basis; the NFL seems to be quietly on board - and, in any case, if Toronto is indeed part of Buffalo's market, would a new owner or the existing owner even require a league-sanctioned "relocation" to move the team north full-time?
All of which leaves the Argos, and the CFL, in a precarious position.
Understanding to a degree what was imminent, they had hoped to work with the NFL - hence the proposal by Howard Sokolowski and David Cynamon, ridiculed in some quarters, to get out front of the juggernaut and try and become part of a purchase group, using the prospect of the CFL's continued existence as leverage with the NFL hierarchy.
Since no one south of the border even bothered to tell them that this was coming, it seems that the NFL might not be quite so sentimental - or so committed to its oft-stated goal that the more football played in more places around the globe, the better.
So what now?
Unless the CFL commissioner receives some kind of ironclad reassurance from his NFL counterpart Roger Goodell that his league will be looked after, unless the Argo owners come up with some new rationale for losing money running a team in a market where they will eventually be squeezed out of existence, the only option will be to fight.
On political grounds. On cultural grounds.
The NFL could have worked on neutralizing any potential resistance by cutting a deal that would be beneficial to all. Maybe they don't think it matters, and maybe, in Toronto at least, it won't.
But there have been other times in history when American interlopers expected to be greeted with a scattering of rose petals, and instead were met with a nasty surprise.
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