Hamilton Tiger-Cats' owner/caretaker Bob Young wrote an interesting post on his Tumblr this week (via Jaime Stein) about the CFL and the possibility of the NFL coming to Canada, which is in the news again thanks to the ongoing Bills in Toronto series and the discussions about a potential Jon Bon Jovi/MLSE partnership to buy the Bills and move them to Toronto full-time. Young makes a strong and passionate argument for the value of the CFL, which is something many Canadians would agree with; it's notable that a poll earlier this month suggested even Toronto residents don't want the NFL at the CFL's expense. However, arguments on their own only do so much good without accompanying practical solutions, and the solutions Young advances are particularly interesting. His first proposal is that the CFL needs to convince executives like Postmedia executive (and longtime NFL-in-Toronto lobbyist) Paul Godfrey and corporations like Rogers (which runs the Bills-in-Toronto series) of its value, and while that's certainly a good idea, it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. His second proposal, though, is much more notable and potentially attainable: that the CFL partner with the NFL in some formal fashion:

And secondly we must partner with the National Football League in an organized and mutually profitable way. It is already true that CFL coaches and general managers, whether Canadian or American have many friends among their counterparts in the NFL teams. The CFL league office has more in common with the NFL league office (and vice versa) than they do with any other institution on the planet. After all, the CFL and NFL are the only two “gridiron” football leagues. The National Football league is a lot like the Canadian Football League, being a collection of teams who banded together to form an institution dedicated to their collective success. Our leagues are among the most successful cooperatives in the history of business anywhere. We have more incentive to cooperate with each other than any two businesses you could name.

That plan may raise the hackles of some CFL fans who are fervently anti-NFL at all costs, but there's actually good logic here. A prosperous CFL helps the NFL on several fronts. For one thing, it serves as a player-development system. Players like Cameron Wake, Brandon Browner and Jerrell Freeman have gone from CFL stars to NFL stars, and others like Kory Sheets may follow. There really aren't a lot of alternatives out there for players past college who can't quite crack the NFL initially, as the UFL has folded and the AFL still has plenty of issues in the wake of Arena Football 1's 2009 bankruptcy, and there needs to be something; NFL teams bring 90 guys to camp in the offseason now, but only keep 61 (53 active, eight on the practice roster). A lot of those NFL camp cuts wind up in the CFL, and some of them develop to a point where they're capable of going back to the NFL.

That's a very useful service for the NFL. Keep in mind that the failed NFL Europe was a developmental league as well as a way to expand the league's brand overseas. With it out of the picture, the UFL gone, the AFL facing issues and next to no quality gridiron football elsewhere around the globe, the CFL remains a valuable developmental pipeline for the NFL. The numbers here aren't huge, as it's usually 10 or less CFL players that get NFL shots in any given offseason, but they aren't insignificant either.

Moreover, a healthy CFL serves the NFL on a public relations front, and potentially on a legal front as well. Crushing the CFL would be extremely bad PR for the NFL, as the Canadian league is no threat to the NFL's dominance and doesn't have anywhere near the U.S. league's resources; it also might convince U.S. lawmakers to take another look at the NFL from an antitrust point of view, something that worked very well for NFL players in the last lockout.That's why the NFL has generally been supportive of the CFL over the years, including not raising much of a stink about the CFL's ill-fated American expansion and even giving the CFL a loan during the rough days of the late 1990s. (Both developments are well-chronicled in Ed Willes' End Zones and Border Wars, an excellent book we'll have more on here shortly.) That loan was at least partly negotiated by Roger Goodell, now the NFL commissioner, and he's said in the past that "The CFL is very important to us." Here's what Goodell said about the CFL shortly after the first Bills-in-Toronto game in 2008: