All things considered, the Saskatchewan Roughriders had a pretty good season last year.
The Canadian Football League team, based in Regina, an outpost on Canada's western frontier, went 11-7 and made it to the semifinals. Five players were named all-stars and a single-game attendance record of 33,032 was set at Taylor Field.
But none of that is a ticket to financial stability in the CFL, a league that for each of the past 10 years seemed on the verge of delivering the last rites with its Grey Cup championship trophy.
To balance their books, the Roughriders had to get creative.
There was the Women's Night dinner where players modeled bathing suits. And the annual Plaza of Honor Induction Dinner where no one, not even the team president, got in without paying the $250 a plate contribution. Then there was the $100-a-ticket lottery.
The fund-raisers put the team into the black for the third time in five years, and made it one of only two CFL clubs to make money last year, according to the team's president. But the $109,000 profit barely dented the Roughriders' $2 million accumulated deficit.
Such is life in a folksy league that, although 27 years older than the National Football League, makes less from its TV contracts than some NFL teams earn through sales of beer, hot dogs and stadium ads. The CFL has gambled that expansion to the United States will bring financial stability, but it is a high-risk strategy that could backfire.
So far the only clear success has been Baltimore, which leads the league in attendance. But its energy has yet to spread to the other teams.
"I think we saw something had to be done," said John Lipp, president of the community-owned Roughriders and a Regina City Councilman.
"We had reached the point where the league had lost some excitement," he said. "One thing we could do was add new teams.
"When we made the decision to expand, we knew we'd never be the same, whether it's in the long term for the good or for our demise. It could go either way."
The 102-year-old CFL seemed on the verge of a long-predicted collapse before it expanded to the United States in 1993. During the past decade, average game attendance has fallen 11 percent and network TV revenues have been cut in half.
In response, the league has changed commissioners three times, playoff format four times and the size or composition of player rosters three times. It has also charged member teams millions of dollars to bail out the most troubled franchises.
Meanwhile, clubs have been changing owners faster than quarterbacks. In the years immediately preceding expansion, five of the CFL's nine teams were sold, some more than once. Two, Ottawa and British Columbia, briefly were taken over by the league to keep them afloat.
Big cities have trouble
Oddly, the largest cities -- generally the hottest markets for sports teams -- have been the coolest to the CFL. The Toronto Argonauts, playing in the CFL's biggest city, have their fourth owner since 1988, and their per-game attendance is next to last among the clubs this year. The team in Montreal, the CFL's ancestral homeland and Canada's second-largest city, went out of business in 1987 and hasn't been replaced.
"You walk to the water cooler on Monday morning, and there seems to be more discussion of the NFL than the CFL," said Robert Wanzel, a professor and former director of the sports management program at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.
"Now the parties are on Super Bowl Sunday, not Grey Cup Sunday," Mr. Wanzel said.
The CFL's television ratings reflect its decline. Although the Grey Cup still attracts a strong following in Canada -- larger than the Super Bowl -- it ranked below the Toronto-Philadelphia World Series and the Vancouver-New York Stanley Cup Finals.
Worse, the NFL often wins head-to-head ratings contests, said Maria Tassone, a spokeswoman for the Global Television Network, an Ontario broadcaster that carries some NFL games, including the Super Bowl. "It's a glitzier version of football," she said.
No wonder, then, that team owners aimed for the world's richest sports market, the United States. If it works, supporters say, the strategy could catapult the sport to major-league status, on par with the NHL, NBA, baseball and even the NFL.
But if it fails, the CFL could be forced out of business.
CFL Commissioner Larry Smith scoffs at the notion that it was expand or die for the CFL and sees a bright future.
Mr. Smith, a passionate supporter of expansion, says the new teams have brought excitement and savvy investors -- not to mention millions of dollars in expansion fees -- to the game.
So far, reaction has been mixed. An average of 20,203 fans turned out for the first 36 games of the season, about 10 percent fewer than during the same period last season.
Among the weakest performers: teams in Las Vegas and Sacramento, with average game attendance of 11,025 and 14,822, ranking them 12th and ninth in the 12-game league. Shreveport, La., at 18,689, ranks seventh.
Mr. Smith said he's not worried and anticipated the cities would have to gradually warm to the new sport, with its new rules. And Canadian interest traditionally heats up later in the season, he said.
No such break-in was necessary in Baltimore, where antagonism toward repeated NFL snubs have fans marching around the stadium with cartoonish effigies of the NFL's commissioner.
Mr. Smith calls the nameless Baltimore franchise a "model" for expansion. That's probably an understatement. It's the most successful and likely the most profitable CFL team on either side of the border.
Before last night's game against Toronto, attendance averaged 35,883, which not only leads the league, but means that one of every seven CFL tickets sold this season have been for games at Memorial Stadium.
In fact, without Baltimore, the CFL's total attendance would be running below last year's -- despite the two other new teams this year. The average per-game turnout would be 17 percent less.
"I don't think there's a place in the country like Baltimore," franchise owner James Speros said.
Can the success of Baltimore be duplicated elsewhere? The future of the CFL may depend upon it.
Steven B. Reid, a sports and entertainment industry analyst with H.J. Meyers & Co. investment banking firm in Beverly Hills, predicts that the league will find a ready market in football-crazy America.
"I think this league definitely has legs. All you need is marketing talent to make things happen," said Mr. Reid, whose firm served as underwriter for the initial stock offering of the CFL Las Vegas Posse, the first CFL team to publicly issue stock.
"Who wants to see the NFL when someone kicks 63 [yards] to win? People want to see action," Mr. Reid said.
Moreover, the franchises are cheap to run. "The teams don't have to make a hell of a lot of money to be profitable," Mr. Reid said.
Baltimore rings up profits
Mr. Speros said his team, with better-than-expected corporate support and fan turnout, is on a pace to generate $7 million in revenues this year. He wouldn't disclose his profit projections, but acknowledged it could lead the league.
Visiting teams don't share in gate revenues in the CFL, so the home team keeps 100 percent of it (a policy some teams want to change). If Baltimore can average 35,000 fans a game for the season at an average ticket price of $18, it would bring in $5.7 million in gate receipts alone.
Toss in local and network TV money, the proceeds of merchandise sales, concessions, advertising and other miscellaneous moneymakers, and Mr. Speros' projections seem conservative.
Meanwhile, CFL costs are an owner's dream. The salary cap limits each team's player payroll to $1.9 million, plus whatever they want to spend on an additional "marquee" athlete. Players average $30,000 a year in the United States.
The Baltimore team's lease at Memorial Stadium helps, too. In exchange for making certain renovations and collecting a ticket tax, the team will pay $1 a year rent and special assessments of a few thousand dollars when attendance hits certain benchmarks.
The success of his team has made Mr. Speros, 35, a force within the CFL. And he's waded right into its biggest debate: the course and pace of expansion.
He is among the owners advising a rapid push into big cities to enhance the CFL's credibility and appeal to TV networks. Others suggest a modest strategy, which would see the league prosper in smaller towns and never rival the big four leagues.
Mr. Speros said he thinks the CFL should be in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles by 1996.
David Dixon, a New Orleans businessman and founder of the defunct United States Football League, agrees with that hurry-up offense strategy.
"The Canadian League, in my judgment, can't make it keeping Ottawa and Hamilton and Saskatchewan and then begin with lesser markets in the U.S.," Mr. Dixon said. "The American public will not, I think, accept a minor league on a national basis. I think America will always be ready for an alternative league as long as the NFL conducts itself as it does, ripping off cities like Baltimore."
But big cities bring big risks. The league can't afford to have a team fail to pry fans from all the other entertainment options in the megalopolises. The record is not good: neither Toronto nor Montreal has been as supportive of the CFL since U.S. baseball expanded into Montreal in 1969 and Toronto in 1977.
Paul Much, a financial consultant to sports teams and senior managing director of Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin in Chicago, said a slew of alternative football leagues have come and gone during the years, and he's not sure the CFL can make it. His advice: stick to small cities, keep costs low and stay out of the way of major-league competitors.
"The question is, does America need alternative football?" he said. "The NFL just has such a good product and promotes it well. I just don't see where there is demand except in those tertiary markets," he said.
"You can succeed if you market yourself well and manage your costs. But you need a reality check on expectations. I don't know if they are going to make it."
Among the team executives counseling a go-slow approach is John C. Ramsey, president of the Edmonton Eskimos. "Why do you go into major markets? To say you are in a major market?" Mr. Ramsey asked.
"I think there is a place for TV and TV revenues and TV to promote the league. . . . Yes, TV is important, and large markets are important, but you've got to take them in order and go slow," he said.
League officials are aware that moving into big cities pits the CFL against the NFL -- a fight they are not eager for. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue has already said his league is considering a move north, either through expansion or relocation, which would rob the CFL of its best markets and possibly kill it.
Seeking non-NFL cities
"Our strategy is predominantly to go into non-NFL cities. We can fill up cities where the NFL is not going to go," said Mr. Smith, the CFL commissioner. A decision on moving into big cities can wait, he said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. expansion has raised prickly issues of Canadian nationalism.
"Canadians as a whole have quite an inferiority complex," said Frank Costenino, a professor at York University in North York, Canada, and the author of a three-volume history of football in that country.
He said there's a risk that Canadian fans will lose interest as the sport ceases to be all-Canadian.
Sensitive to that, the league has put aside talk of dropping Canada from its name. Mr. Smith said the governors have opted instead to redesign the maple-leaf logo, incorporating a symbol of the United States.
The Americanization of the sport has been a tough issue for the CFL Players Association, too. The union has fought to retain a long-standing limit on non-Canadian players on Canadian teams. The so-called import rule is illegal for U.S. franchises, and Mr. Speros and others say they think it eventually will have to be dropped if Canadian teams are to compete.
"It's a very emotional issue," said Dan Ferrone, president of the union.
The union, which has not struck in more than 20 years, has been remarkably cooperative with team owners on other matters, accepting pay cuts and tacitly abiding by the salary cap that is not part of the collective bargaining agreement.
"My goal as president is to try and make sure that the franchises are successful," Mr. Ferrone said.
"All these franchises were close to going under before expansion," he said. "I think if expansion doesn't succeed it puts the CFL in serious jeopardy."