The Buch stops here

It has been an interesting road for Roy Williams. The University of North Carolina Tar Heels’ basketball coach has come full circle. He’s now back at his alma mater, but he’s about to face the program that made him nationally famous, and there’s only a berth in the national championship final on the line Saturday to raise the stakes.

Williams played for the Tar Heels’ junior varsity team during his collegiate career, and graduated from North Carolina in 1972 with an education degree. He went on to become a high school coach and athletic director and then returned to UNC in 1978 as an assistant to coaching legend Dean Smith. He served as an assistant coach for 10 years at UNC and then got his big break when he left in 1988 to take over the University of Kansas Jayhawks from famed head coach Larry Brown, who had just led the team to a national championship. Brown jumped up to coach the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, leaving Williams with both high expectations and recruiting violations to deal with.

Williams did remarkably well, though, for a man whose first job as a university head coach was taking over a huge program after an unexpected championship. His team went 19-12 in his first year, despite the sanctions handed down by the NCAA for violations committed under Brown’s tenure. The best was yet to come.

In the years to come, Williams’ Jayhawks went on an amazing run. They made every NCAA tournament between 1989 and 2003 and advanced to the Final Four three times. Over that span, Williams’ teams won 418 games and only lost 101 to record an incredible winning percentage of 80.5 per cent. He was named the National Coach of the Year four times.
Unfortunately, Williams’ greatest triumph with Kansas came just before his departure. He took the Jayhawks to the 2003 national championship game, but they lost a 81-78 heartbreaker to the Syracuse Orange. There was speculation a return to North Carolina was imminent, even though he had publicly avowed to stay with Kansas only three years earlier. Kansas did everything they could to accommodate Williams, even firing athletic director Al Bohl, who had publicly clashed with Williams on several occasions. Still, it wasn’t enough, and Williams flew the Jayhawk coop to rejoin the Tar Heels.

Kansas fans were rightly outraged by Williams’ departure, and showed their disapproval in many poignant ways. One of the most memorable was the relocation of the sketch of Williams hanging in the Downtown Barbershop, a local landmark and hair-cutting business which also serves as a shrine for all things Jayhawks. It went from a place of honour on the wall to hanging above the toilet in the newly-rechristened Roy Room.

“We figured if Roy had stuck around, they would have named a building after him,” John Amyx, owner of the Downtown Barbershop, told the Associated Press. “So we decided to name a room after him. That seemed to be the best place to see his picture, too.”

As J. Brady McCullough of the Kansas City Star wrote, the resentment still runs hot in Kansas five years later.

“For some, that’s what makes KU-Carolina a dream scenario,” he wrote. “Beat Williams, North Carolina and those diamond-patterned shorts on the way to a national championship, and it’s even sweeter.”

This should be an epic game. You have Kansas coach Bill Self, who has had great runs in the tournament but is cracking the Final Four for the first time, against Williams, who is third all-time in NCAA winning percentage. You have two great teams, both top-ranked in their regions entering the tournament, set to duel for the right to go to the championship match. Most importantly, though, the Jayhawks’ fans finally have a chance at revenge. They’ve been waiting five long years for this moment but have never come up against Williams in the NCAA tournament. On Saturday night, it’s Williams and his old/new team against the program where he built his reputation. There will be plenty of people rooting for Williams to get another crack at the elusive championship, but very few of them will be from Kansas.

Update: I incorrectly wrote that Williams had never won a national championship. In fact, as Mike pointed out, he won the 2005 national championship with UNC. Apologies for the error.

Sunday saw a tremendously successful Grey Cup game take place in Toronto between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. As the Globe and Mail’s William Houston observed earlier this week, the CBC averaged 3.34 million viewers—the sixth-highest audience ever for a Grey Cup telecast—despite fears by many that the small-market nature of the competing teams would lessen national interest. It was the first time the Grey Cup had been held in Toronto since 1992, when thousands of unsold tickets detracted from the atmosphere.

This time around, the organizers got it right: tickets were sold out; tremendous acts such as Great Big Sea, Spirit of the West and Lenny Kravitz were lined up for the festivities; and the whole country was talking about three-down football for a week. The on-field product didn’t disappoint either, as the expected Saskatchewan blowout of a Blue Bombers team without their star quarterback failed to materialize and a thoroughly enjoyable closely-contested game appeared in its place.

The success of this Grey Cup speaks volumes about where the CFL is at. The league continues to produce an enjoyable, distinctly Canadian product and has shown with this Grey Cup they can stage events with the best of them. In fact, according to Houston, the TV audience was only slightly smaller than the 3.37 million who watched last year’s Super Bowl. It was a thrilling conclusion to a great season.

What keeps this from being a complete success, however, are events external to the league, closely related to the aforementioned Super Bowl. As the Globe’s Stephen Brunt commented on Monday, “Bringing the great celebration of pigskin nationalism back to the country’s largest market after a 15-year absence was always going to be a referendum on the health and relevance of the Canadian Football League here at a time when threats loom to the south.” Those dangers to the CFL, namely Buffalo Bills’ owner Ralph Wilson’s plan to bring his team (and by extension, the National Football League) north for eight games over the next five years, have never been so clear and present.

It seems obvious that Wilson’s plan is only the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps the NFL’s ploy to get its foot in the door of one of the few large North American markets without its presence. In fact, in the prelude to the Grey Cup, Mark Cohon became the first commissioner in CFL history to directly address the threat of an NFL team relocating to Toronto on a permanent basis.

“All of the tea leaves are indicating that it’s shifting,” Cohon told the media in a press conference last Friday. “You have guys like Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum and Phil Lind, very powerful Canadians who are interested, you have an owner in Ralph Wilson in Buffalo who has said, ‘When I die, my estate will sell the franchise,’ you have the Bills interested in marking Toronto as part of their territory, which I believe is indication that, ‘Hey this our territory, we don’t want another NFL team coming here.’ So I think there’s all these things lining up as an indication that it could happen. So, I’m not sticking my head in the sand, that would be the worst thing for the CFL commissioner to do. ”

Cohon deserves applause for taking so bold a stand. The threat is imminent and is greater than it has ever been. As a Nov. 23 Canadian Press story stated, “Talk of the NFL coming to Toronto has existed since the 1970s. But the combination of Wilson’s statement, the Bills’ playing regular-season games at Rogers Centre, the strength of the Canadian dollar and deep pockets of the Toronto NFL group headed up by Rogers and Tanenbaum has many believing the NFL’s arrival here is inevitable. … The overwhelming belief is that if the NFL does come to Toronto, it will not only spell the end of the Argos and Hamilton Tiger-Cats, but ultimately the CFL.”

B.C. Lions offensive lineman Rob Murphy—recently named the CFL’s top lineman—didn’t go quite as far in his comments on TSN’s Off the Record show Friday, but still made it clear that the NFL coming to Canada would severely damage Canadian football.

“It will definitely be a detriment to the CFL,” he said.

Murphy added that trying to stop the NFL would be a difficult task.

“The NFL is the big bad brother on the block,” he said. “If they want to come here, they will come here, no question about it.”

Some have suggested that the CFL could survive as a regional entity if it abandoned the Southern Ontario market to the NFL. However, this logic is highly questionable. Without Toronto (and to a lesser extent, Hamilton), the league loses its national TV exposure, most of its sponsors and a significant portion of its fan base. As unfortunate as it is for westerners who are sick of hearing about the “Centre of the Universe,” you can’t hope to exist as a high-profile sport in Canada without a franchise in Toronto.
In his press conference, Cohon stated that maintaining these markets is vital for the CFL.
“I’m not going to preside over a league that has a Grey Cup just out west,” he said. “That’s not what I was hired to do. Any type of relationship that we have [with the NFL] has to make sure that the eight existing franchises are strong, growing and healthy. I think southern Ontario is critical to this league and I’ll make sure I protect it and grow it.”

Cohon has the right idea in mind here: taking on the NFL head-on is a recipe for disaster due to their massive supremacy in resources, but it’s absolutely un-Canadian to fly in the face of American invasion. It’s necessary to try and make accommodations, but there are certain concessions (such as giving up Ontario) that cannot be made. If the NFL is willing to ensure the CFL’s survival and continued growth, fine, but otherwise, in the words of Canadian cultural heroes Bob and Doug McKenzie, “Take off, hoser!”

The last time Americans tried to push into what’s now Southern Ontario, they were repelled by heroes of the War of 1812 such as Tecumseh, Laura Secord and General Isaac Brock. Hopefully Cohon, the rest of the CFL’s leadership and our current government will follow in that proud tradition and continue to stand up to the Americans. In the 1970s, the federal government passed legislation to stop the just-formed Toronto Northmen of the World Football League from operating in Canada, forcing them to relocate to Memphis before ever taking a snap. Cohon said such measures aren’t needed yet, but he may discuss them with the government if the NFL is unwilling to co-operate.

The ultimate summary of this year’s Grey Cup came during Lenny Kravitz’s great halftime performance. To strong applause, he cranked out his jazzed-up version of the Guess Who’s Canadian classic, American Woman, the words of which still resound as strongly as they did when the song was released in the Vietnam era. The coloured lights of the NFL can continue to hypnotize, but with any luck, they’ll be sparkling in someone else’s eyes. An invasion from their league will be no good for this country. Canada still has our rules, our teams, our cup and our pride, and the American league should stay away from us.

The Philadelphia Flyers have been doling out a lot of punishment over the course of the NHL season thus far. First, Steve Downie, a player with a history of violence so long that he’ll undoubtedly be played by Viggo Mortensen in any biopic, jumped up to hit concussion-prone Ottawa Senators’ forward Dean McAmmond. For his trouble, Downie wound up with a 20-game suspension and McAmmond received another concussion. The Flyers then pulled an incredibly classy move, trying to evade the suspension by reassigning Downie to their AHL affiliate. Fortunately, they weren’t able to pull the wool over either league’s eyes, and the AHL reciprocated the suspension.

Earlier this month, the pattern continued when Jesse Boulerice cross-checked Vancouver Canucks’ forward Ryan Kesler across the face with his stick. Kesler was fortunate to escape without serious injury. For his actions, Boulerice was suspended for 25 games, the longest-single season ban in NHL history. Kesler told the Vancouver Province that Boulerice deserved more punishment than Downie for his actions.

“Downie’s was a hockey play, but a dirty hockey play,” Kesler said. “Crosschecking someone to the face isn’t a hockey play—it’s someone taking advantage of someone not being aware of a guy blindsiding him. … He could have possibly ended my season. Luckily, he broke his stick because he could have broken my jaw. He deserves whatever he gets.”

Kesler’s right, here: a dirty hit is a dirty hit, but is only slightly over the line that differentiates finishing checks from taking players out. Swinging a stick at someone’s face, on the other hand, doesn’t even come close to justifiable as a part of hockey. Thus the league was right to hand out the longer ban to Boulerice. Perhaps both punishments should have been more severe, though, as later events demonstrated the Flyers’ attitude was unchanged.

The latest event in the sad saga was Randy Jones’ hit from behind that concussed Patrice Bergeron. It wasn’t as bad as the preceding two acts: if the plays by Downie and Boulerice represent the highest level of dirty hockey, then Jones’ hit would be off toiling for the Belfast Giants à la Theoren Fleury. However, it was still a hit from behind, and more troublingly, the third in short succession from the same franchise. With this in mind, NHL discipline czar Colin Campbell handed Jones a two-game suspension.

What these plays collectively demonstrate is the return to character of the Flyers, historically one of the roughest teams in the NHL. In fact, their only Stanley Cup wins came in 1975 and 1976, where they were appropriately known as the “Broad Street Bullies”. Those teams featured such stellar characters as Bobby Clarke, famous for the slash right out of a mob drama that broke Soviet star Valery Kharlamov’s ankle back in the Canada-Russia 1972 Summit Series, Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, who established a single-season penalty-minute record that still stands today, and Ed Van Impe, whose brutal cross-check on Kharlamov in a 1976 exhibition game caused the whole Soviet team to retreat to their dressing room in protest.

It’s no shocker that the Flyers have stuck with the same institutional philosophy of smashing their way through the NHL, particularly considering that Clarke was the general manager of the franchise for 19 years and is currently the senior vice-president of the team. In fact, the mafioso nature of the Downie and Boulerice incidents, clearly designed to knock a specific opponent out of the game, suggests that they were attempting to emulate their vice-president as best as they could.

The way I see it, rough play itself is not the problem. There have been plenty of teams that have excelled both with skill and grit, such as the 1982 Vancouver Canucks (which incidentally, Colin “Soupy” Campbell was a member of), the 2004 Calgary Flames and the 2007 Anaheim Ducks, who led the league in fighting majors on their way to claiming the Stanley Cup. However, all of those teams largely stayed within the bounds of what is acceptable in the game of hockey: they finished their checks, they took their penalties, but they didn’t set out to knock opponents out of the game in the fashion that Clarke demonstrated back in his playing career, which Downie and Boulerice have now adopted.

The troubling aspect is when an organization’s entire philosophy—in everything from drafting players to signing free agents and developing coaching systems— is devoted to battering their way through the league by any means necessary. Three incidents in less than two months (and incidentally, the only three suspensions handed down to players in that period) is far too many for any franchise, particularly when the first two are of the particularly macabre grade of the Downie and Boulerice hits. If the Flyers do anything else to cross the line this year, the league office should come down on them as heavily as a Dave Schultz hammer punch.

There are many disturbing aspects of the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills proposal Thursday to play two annual games in Toronto. It makes perfect sense for the Bills, who have had trouble attracting corporate support in recent years, and it works well for the proponents of Toronto as an NFL town who stand to rake in the cash from this venture, but it could be an early omen of doom for the Canadian Football League as we know it.

The plan itself doesn’t seem too harmful at first glance, as two NFL games a year wouldn’t be likely to catastrophically wound the Toronto Argonauts or the CFL. In fact, CFL commissioner Mark Cohon told the Associated Press Tuesday that he doesn’t object to the plan if it doesn’t hurt the viability of the Argonauts or the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

“The one thing I want to be crystal clear about is that for the CFL to continue to be successful, we need to have our two southern Ontario franchises be successful,” Cohon told the Associated Press. “It’s an issue critical to our business.”

Cohon’s right to take a stand here about maintaining both franchises. The CFL could certainly still operate without teams in Toronto or Hamilton, but it would be in a barely recognizable form. The Toronto-based media would certainly reduce their coverage of the league, and most games probably wouldn’t be shown on national television. The league would become a regional entity, and attendance and revenues would both drastically drop. Ex-commissioner Tom Wright said Monday on The FAN 590’s Prime Time Sports radio show that 95 per cent of the league’s advertising revenues come from southern Ontario.

Without these revenues, the remaining CFL teams would be forced to offer even smaller salaries and thus would be likely reduced to fielding rosters composed of arena football’s castoffs. Additionally, the league would become narrowly regional, and would have a tough time claiming to be a sport that represents all Canadians. As Prime Time Sports host Bob McCown said Monday, “Without Toronto and Hamilton, the wheels fall off the kiddie cart.”

On their own, two NFL games a year wouldn’t kill either CFL franchise. However, the plan becomes far more problematic when the bigger picture is considered. It’s difficult to argue that the Bills’ owners would be in a rush to stay in the small Buffalo market after a taste of the vast, NFL-hungry GTA.

It seems far more likely that this is only the first scene in a five-act tragedy, with the inevitable conclusion being an NFL team based in Toronto and the beginning of the end for the CFL. As former CFL commissioner Tom Wright said on The FAN 590’s Prime Time Sports radio show Monday, “They’ve put their toe in the water, and we all know what happens when professional sports franchises encroach on another franchise’s territory.”

Brian McCarthy, the NFL’s vice-president of corporate communications, told the Associated Press this is merely a step to help the team boost its revenues in its current location.

“They do need to further regionalize both fan and corporate support in their home territory,” McCarthy said. “So this would help the team further successfully operate in the future in western New York.”

McCarthy added that the NFL supports the CFL.

“Canada has a football-rich history and we hope to help it continue in making it wildly successful,” he said.

On the surface, McCarthy’s comments aren’t too disturbing for CFL fans. However, as Wright said, “The words have always been, ‘We’ll never hurt the CFL.’ I believe that, but that’s different from saying we’ll help grow it. If you sit back and do nothing, you will hurt the CFL. My honest opinion is that the NFL will do what’s in the NFL’s best interests.”

As Wright pointed out, having this news released to the CFL through media reports rather than a direct communication from the NFL is another indication that the American league isn’t too concerned about what’s best for its Canadian counterpart.

“It was a complete blindside, and that speaks volumes,” he said.

Maybe there’s a chance for the CFL to hang on. Maybe it can continue to offer entertaining, three-down Canadian football even with the elephant not only in the room, but lounging on the couch and leaving stale pizza crusts and beer bottles strewn all over the floor. As The Globe and Mail’s Stephen Brunt pointed out in a column Friday, “[T]here 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.”

For fellow unapologetic fans of the CFL, I sincerely hope that history repeats itself.