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“Our fans are passionate and we’ve heard from fans how they want more engagement with the league. We just weren’t doing enough in the off-season to engage with them to bring great content and great ways for them to get excited about the upcoming season,” she said. “

At the same time we have a lot of things we have to do, like the combine and the draft, and last year we created a new event with TSN and Adidas to do a media shoot, which we did in Toronto last year. We brought about 50 players to Toronto … to do a shoot to unveil the new Adidas uniforms and combined it with the TSN-RDS shoot that they’d done at night, going from training camp to training camp, that I don’t think anybody really loved. We did a bit of a media car wash there, as well.”

Photo by Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The idea this year was to build on that success.

“We had happy players who loved the fact that they were being treated like the stars that we know that they are,” she said. “There was just so much opportunity to do more with everybody in one place. Taking those two things, we started to think what more can we do and began to think of bringing this directly to our fans, live and in person, as well. In a way it grew to kind of a Grey Cup activation. The thought was ‘What if we did that and put a few of these things together and added some layers to that. When we started talking to fans it became a no brainer. That’s how ‘Mark’s CFL Week’ was born.”

The changes were made, she said, in large part due to feedback from fans.

“They’re coming from not just all over Saskatchewan but from all over Canada. We wanted to make sure it was going to be a really fun experience for them. At the same time, we’ve had a lot of support from our CFL corporate partners. Once Mark’s expressed interest to make this bigger and a number of other partners signed on to be a part of it, it helped us fund what we’re doing.”

It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that the budget for the event will be well over $1 million, when you consider airfare and hotel rooms for 50 CFL stars, prospects, CFL staff and everybody else involved.

“It’s a substantial investment from our ownership group and it goes to investing in what we’re doing,” Litz said.

Fantastic. But if the same people won’t stand up to the football ops people during the season to accomplish the same goal when it doesn’t cost a dime? Mind-boggling.

Email: tjones@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @sunterryjones