Former TSN reporter Gary Lawless wants CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie to be honest with fans of the three-down league about what’s going on with the XFL.
The owners from both the CFL and XFL publicly shared the agreed to work together to identify opportunities for both to innovate and grow the game of football in March.
“Randy Ambrosie won’t come out and say what’s actually happening right now,” Lawless said on The Rod Pedersen Show.
“There’s a huge void of information right now and that’s because the people that run the CFL aren’t talking, and they need to talk, they need to share a little more of what is actually going on.”
Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia and RedBird Capital were selected as the winning bidders last August for all of the assets of Alpha Entertainment LLC, the parent company of the XFL. It cost $15 million and the goal is to make the XFL a stable league in the future, which could be aided by an agreement with the CFL.
“I believe certainly they’re having talks about a merger and not about a couple of games or a playoff game against one another. Gerry Cardinale and the people at RedBird they’re not interested in that. They want to have a full blown merger with the CFL. There’s lots of variables,” Lawless said.
The veteran media man also sees many hurdles for the CFL to clear just to be able to play football in 2021. The league office has targeted August 5 as a potential kick-off date for the regular season. Most importantly, the league has said a ‘significant’ number of fans must be allowed in stadiums around opening day to proceed.
“Whether or not there is a CFL season this year, I’m not sure about that. There’s not going to be a season if they can’t put people in the stands, the CFL can’t afford that. They can’t afford to have a season without ticket-buying people in the stands,” Lawless said.
“Maybe Saskatchewan and Winnipeg would be OK doing that, but Toronto is not going to do that, the guys in Montreal are not going to do that, the people in B.C. aren’t going to do that. I’d be surprised if Calgary was willing to throw that money down the toilet. So I don’t see that happening, they need to sell tickets before they play.”
