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That part translates into getting with the team presidents, and now that we know where our challenges are, let’s figure out a plan to go forward. And the way the team presidents responded to that was remarkable. You know, it’s never perfect, but they understood it. It’s like we just needed to show them. We needed to show one another what we had.

It’s been clear to me that those two groups, the league governors and the team presidents, are the key to the entire future of the league because you cannot work with one over the other. You have to do all your day-to-day work with the team presidents because they literally are the guys who understand the business the best. They understand the game. They are the connecting tissue between governance and management because they have a foot in both worlds. Whereas the governors are more detached from the game of football.

I think this group all fundamentally understand that this league had never really reached its full potential and there’s an opportunity to do that. And I’m incredibly encouraged by the attitude that the governors have. There’s a desire for this league to be better than it is.

So one of the things that we’ve done is gone out to the other leagues and I’ve tried to gather a sense of what their best practices are. You learn a lot from that exercise.

Photo by Al Charest / Postmedia Network

So for example, the NBA, David Stern creates a team services group. It was an acknowledgement that in some of your core areas of business, selling tickets and selling sponsorships, not all the teams are as good as all the other teams. So the first thing they did is realize they can compete on the court, but they had to co-operate and collaborate off the court.