Article content continued

Look, this is absolutely nothing against Winnipeg, a city that loves its football as much or more than any of its population size (700,000) north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

And this is nothing against either the Oakland Raiders or Green Bay Packers, the combatants in Thursday night’s game at the home of the locally beloved Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the CFL: IG Field (8 p.m. EDT kickoff, TSN).

If this were a regular-season tilt between the Raiders and Packers, it’d be a whole different story. Now THAT would be something to legitimately get excited about.

The NFL continues to think we Canadians are so dumb we’ll pay any insane price for the privilege of watching just a PRESEASON game!!!!!

Not.

We actually won’t.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Sadly, more than a decade later, the league did not learn its lesson from the Bills in Toronto fiasco. In 2008, the first year the Buffalo franchise relocated one home game to Toronto’s downtown dome (the Rogers Centre, nee SkyDome), Bills and Rogers executives yukked it up and jacked prices through the dome’s roof. The average ticket price was $183, compared to $51 for Bills games at its home stadium in suburban Orchard Park.

A buddy of mine said he had to pay as much for two tickets to that first Bills-in-Toronto game as he did for two SEASON tickets for the other seven games in Buffalo. A shocked Rogers literally gave away thousands of free tickets at the last minute, to try to fill up its dome.

In Year 2 Rogers slashed ticket prices by an average of 17%, and expanded the under-$100 allotment to 11,000 tickets, in a stadium that seats close to 50,000. Yet they still had to paper the place, then kept doing it every year, even by the last year of the series, 2013, when prices of most tickets dropped below $100. It was too late. The market was poisoned.