Mark Cohon bid goodbye to the CFL following the 102nd Grey Cup game, after seven years on the job. Cohon certainly presided over some momentous times for the CFL, mostly with success. His departure is a blow to the league.

I had the privilege of interviewing Mark Cohon several years ago for another blog by email. That was one of his strengths: he saw when somebody was making the CFL better known and talked about, and volunteered to answer my questions about CFL expansion to increase publicity for the league.

Cohon had to be a bit cagey and cautious with his answers. The shadow of his predecessor’s fate, Tom Wright, who at one time promised the CFL a tenth team and instead lost one when Ottawa blew up in his face, was ever present.

There were many issues on the commissioner’s plate; the following is a summary of what he achieved, both successfully and unsuccessfully, and what he leaves behind for his successor.

The Good

1. Labour Peace

When one remembers the two major labour confrontations the NHL had, one costing an entire season, and the numerous bitter disputes in the MLB, NFL, and NBA, signing a new labour agreement between the CFL and its player’s union was probably Cohon’s top achievement. The struggling CFL could not afford a disastrous player strike. He’s put that issue behind them and the league can move forward on other issues.

2. New Television Contract and More Revenue for the League

Cohon signed a new television contract with TSN, greatly increasing television income for the league, which reflected the CFL’s growing popularity on Canadian television and in the United States on ESPN. But there may be one dark shadow. Before, it was possible to see the CFL for free on CBC and CTV. Now the league can only be watched on television through cable and satellite television packages, which not everybody can afford. How this will affect the league in the future is anybody’s guess.

3. Touchdown Atlantic

The CFL still has not expanded in Canada beyond its traditional nine teams, but Cohon took a visionary step that no other CFL Commissioner did, and played CFL regular season games in a non-CFL Canadian city. Taking advantage of small, plucky Moncton’s attempt to upstage Halifax by building a stadium, Cohon successfully staged three CFL regular season games in the Maritime city, which helped increase the CFL’s popularity and may have laid the groundwork for a future CFL team in the region.

4. The Return Of Ottawa

The Ottawa ownership issue was the dagger that slew the unfortunate Tom Wright, so one of Cohon’s major priorities was getting a team back in Ottawa. He succeeded despite local political troubles centering around the cost of building a new stadium; that issue delayed the return of team for four years. The CFL was always going to return to Ottawa, so perhaps Cohon’s best achievement in this regard was choosing owners who so far have marketed the team correctly, producing a sell-out for every game.

One sour note: In all the hoopla about getting Ottawa back, nobody has questioned the size of Ottawa’s new stadium, which is the smallest in the CFL. Ottawa is Canada’s fourth-largest city, with a population 400,000 greater than Winnipeg; but Winnipeg recently built an enlarged stadium that holds 9,000 more seats than Ottawa’s. One wonders whether the city built a proper stadium for the long term, and whether more unnecessary taxpayer money will have to be raised to correct the mistake in the future.

5. The Winnipeg Stadium

Cohon’s tenure also saw Winnipeg open an enlarged new stadium, capable of holding a Grey Cup with expanded seating, and setting the club’s future on a good path for the long term. You could also lumped in this category the expanded seating in Montreal, the successful transition of the BC Lions while B.C. Place was renovated, and a new Saskatchewan stadium in the future.

The Bad

1. Toronto

When Cohon took office, the CFL had a poor image in Toronto as being minor league, and as he leaves, it still has the same bad image – or worse. Cohon never corrected the continuing slide of the CFL in its largest market. Indeed, it is hard to see that he ever tried anything.

There was an open clamour for an NFL team and the Buffalo Bills unsuccessfully tried to take advantage of the situation by playing one home game a year in Toronto. Even as late as his final interview at the 102nd Grey Cup game in Vancouver on TSN, Cohon denied that there was any problem in Toronto and was content to blame everything on the Rogers Center. He looked to playing games at smaller BMO Field in the future as a solution. Time will tell.

2. Hamilton

This was probably Cohon’s worst mistake. The CFL was given an unexpected golden opportunity when Toronto won the 2015 Pan American Games and delegated some of the sports to Hamilton, which would mean the construction of a new stadium. It should have ended like the Winnipeg stadium, with the Tiger-Cats playing somewhere else in a new enlarged stadium of 35,000 or more.

Instead owner Bob Young objected to the location of the new stadium and no compromise was worked out. Cohon backed Young, even to the point of threatening to pull out of Hamilton and never come back, and stating that Ivor Wynne Stadium was the reason the CFL would not play a Grey Cup game there.

Instead of an enlarged stadium, the Tiger-Cats now play at one with a smaller seating capacity. And because it was being built on the same location as Ivor Wynne, it meant that the team had to play in Guelph and McMaster stadiums, a huge loss in revenue for the team. As a final insult, now that horrid Ivor Wynne is gone, there still is no indication that Hamilton will ever host the Grey Cup.

Ongoing Issues

1. Canadian Participation In The League

Cohon never addressed this issue, which mainly centers around the lack of Canadians playing quarterback in the league. It means working more closely with the CIS and revising CFL rules. Running back is another position that Canadians seldom play, and Jon Cornish’s success is making a fool out the CFL. It’s absurd that the CFL is trying to market to Canadians while also telling them that they are not good enough to play in the league.

2. Unpopularity in Southern Ontario

As noted above, the CFL has done nothing to correct the bad image it has in southern Ontario and that hurts revenues, and even delays possible expansion into two key new markets, Kitchener and London. The CFL has failed to find new fans to replace those that have left, nor made much attempt of wooing its old supporters back. How much does it know its market?

3. Expanding The League

Cohon’s predecessor Tom Wright vowed that he would add a tenth team to the CFL, probably with Halifax; the Ottawa issue undermined his attempt. Cohon took the visionary and successful step of playing regular season games in Moncton. But where does the CFL go from here? Cohon’s legacy, Touchdown Atlantic will only be good if it is a starting point, not an ending point for the league.

There was no Touchdown Atlantic this year, nor was there an attempt to play regular season games in any other non-CFL Canadian cities to see what interest might be aroused. The CFL can’t let this fade away as just a nice experiment. And there will be debate about whether upstart Moncton was the best choice for the games instead of cities like Quebec, London, and Kitchener, all of which have the population for an expansion team right now. But at least a bold, visionary step was taken.

In Summary

Cohon’s tenure as CFL Commissioner was a good one, but one gets that feeling that as he is stepping down, it was only half-finished. If he had applied his savvy fully to the unresolved and unsuccessful problems in the same manner that he applied it to the successful ones, the CFL would be in even better shape than it is now.

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