It was still technically part of the workday when Bill Manning started, from his seat in the corner booth of a downtown Toronto pub, to explain what he had learned about the Toronto Argonauts. There was an analogy he heard the CFL commissioner use once, and he liked it.



“You have a 1974 Chevy, right? It’s sitting in the backyard, the tires are deflated, it’s got rust all over it, and you can’t sell it for a couple of thousand bucks,” he said. “He said, but if you restore that ’74 Chevy — you put on the chrome tires and you wax it up and paint it and do all that — it’s probably worth $75,000. Same car.”



The Argos had been tarnished over the years, Manning said, “with a bit of neglect.”



“How do you modernize that old ’74 Chevy?” he asked. “And that’s kind of what I’m looking at — and what MLSE is looking at — with the...