Hamilton at Calgary Depth Chart Analysis

The Cats try to get off the schneid. Against Calgary. On the road. Ugh.

On to the offensive line. Alford and Lewis are the import tackles. And bizarrely import Simmons is a guard too. Three Americans on the line. I remember back when Marcus Kavka, an American played guard. As I recall that was a bad loss. Rice is the Canadian guard and O'Neill is the centre. The Cats are really missing Dyakowski. Non-import Wojt is on the one game injury list, as is import offensive linemen Dile and Figueroa.

The two wide receivers are the import Ellingson and Giguere. The three starting slots in five receiver sets are Grant and Tasker, both imports and the returning from injury Fantuz. Koch is on the one game injury list. Gable starts are running back with the non-import Prime as fullback when the Cats actually use one. With Prime not in, that's four starting Canadians out of seven required on offense, which isn't normal in the CFL. Masoli starts at quarterback, with LeFevour and McGee (who?) backing up.

On defence, Norwood and Boudreaux are the starting defensive ends. In the middle are the non-imports Bulcke and Laurent. Starting two Canadians in the middle is also a little weird, but not as weird as three Americans on the offensive line.

The linebackers are all imports this week, with Lawrence, Reed and Harris.

Corners are Breaux and non-import Stephen continuing the Cats experiments with non-import corners. Half-backs are Stewart and Davis. Non-import and former Rider Butler starts at safety. So that's four Canadian starters on defence, which is a little weird too. That's eight total starting Canadians, one more than required. I guess the Cats could have started four Americans on the offensive line.

For comparison purposes, Calgary starts four Canadians on the offensive line, no Canadian receivers and a Canadian fullback. Also non-import Walter starts at running back in place of Jon Cornish, which strikes me as a little odd, but Calgary is undefeated so what do I know. On defence they only start one Canadian, Corey Mace at defensive tackle.

At least the Cats don't have Cornish to deal with this week. However they have a cobbled together offensive line and Masoli starting. Unsurprisingly Calgary is nine point favourites.

Apparently the game is on ESPN2 tonight. Hopefully the Cats don't honk it up too much. Also in case you hadn't heard, the Cats have lost nine in a row in Cowtown.

CFL Ratings on ESPN 2

Searching on Google I found this blog with ratings for ESPN and ESPN 2 for July 22 to 28th. What's interesting for CFL fans is that for ESPN down at ranking 19 there's the CFL (on a Thursday) with 273,000 viewers for three hours. In case you're curious that was a game in Montreal against Edmonton that was won 32 to 27 by the Alouettes.

Those aren't bad numbers, especially considering that ESPN 2 doesn't seem to have a lot of live sports during the summer. Considering that I posted yesterday that last week's Canadian CFL rankings were around 900,000 that's encouraging.

Since the Canadian television deal is around $40 million, could a US television deal be worth $12.3 million proportionately (assuming the $40 million for 900,000 per game versus 276,000)? Probably not, although with rumours that the CFL gets almost nothing for its games shown in the US, they're clearly worth something if shown on a channel with good availability in the US. I haven't seen ratings for the CFL on the the NBC sports channel although they may be lower as the channel is fairly new.

I actually found the blog on this forum, where they make the point that the ratings are higher than MLS on ESPN 2, which is kind of amusing. The forumers make the point that Americans love football and with the first half of the CFL season occurring during a football deficit, the CFL really needs to capitalize on it. Imagine the ratings if Tim Tebow showed up.