You know this has been brought up before, but I've just about had it with TSN exclusivity of CFL broadcasts and exposure. As far as I'm concerned the network uses the CFL the way Rogers Sportsnet uses Poker, as filler Canadian content programming between Pro Tennis, Golf and selling CTV's NFL coverage and their Sunday night NFL game.

I went to the TSN 1050 webpage and was flabbergasted, but not surprised to see how far down they rank the Argos among Toronto teams. No surprise the Leafs are furthest to the left side, then comes the Raptors, which in my mind should be the Blue Jays, but since Bell has no stake in the Jays, but do in the Raptors they stick them 2nd behind the Leafs. They have the Jays 3rd (fair enough as they do have a strong following even before the Tulo and Price signing). What really appalls me is that they have TFC 4th ahead of the Argos....Is this damn company kidding me. They mention TFC, a team that can barely get 100,000 viewers for their games ahead of the Argos who make news for not having enough ratings and risk losing sponsors if they're below 500,000 viewers. That's total BS. Talking about Bell taking it up the u know where from Rogers in their MLSE partnership.

Furthermore, I saw that the TSN webpage was publicizing coverage of the Saskatchewan Roughriders News Conference at 1 pm, so I clicked the link, and could you believe to receive access, I had to put in my cable tv password to receive the live signal on the internet, and not just from Bell, but even Rogers, Shaw and etc. Could you believe it? Figuring they wanted to protect their TV audience I turned on the tube to see if I could see the Live news conference on 1 of their 5 stations. To my amazement, US Open Tennis (THE SAME FRIGGIN MATCH) was on TSN1,2,3 and FIBA Basketball (Same FRIGGIN match) was on TSN4,5. Why have the 5 stations if your going to show the same duplicate crap on all of them? Isn't the CFL the most followed sports league in Canada after the NHL, especially in the Prairies? Would it not have made sense and garnered more viewers if the TSN signal that is local in Saskatchewan, TSN2 or TSN3 shown the live press conference regarding the GM and coach change? This is why I'm peeved off enough to start this thread?

The CFL was foolish for giving TSN exclusive rights to broadcast ALL their games and the reasons I've outlined above are why. They should've kept a terrestrial over-the-air station like CBC or Global in the loop because it would have been another outlet to promote and expose the league to a wider audience. The MLB and NFL sell different broadcast rights to different networks. Why couldn't the CFL be smart enough to have done the same? Did they have to give to give TSN Thursday night? Could they not have given an over-the-air network a prime time Saturday night game with a consistent time? TSN presently puts weekend games all over the place. The Bombers played a Saturday home game at the unusual time of 5pm local (6 Eastern) because TSN had a scheduled MLS game starting at 9pm Eastern. I guess satisfying those 100,000 MLS viewers on prime time was more important than satisfying the much larger CFL TV audience. I wonder how they spin that with their advertisers??? How could the perception of being treated as filler content in between US tournaments and even the MLS be good for the league? Didn't CBC offer as much for CFL broadcast rights and did Global also not express interest in broadcasting rights to the CFL. Could the CFL not have used one of these over-the-air networks for the consistency of one national telecast a week, rather than just leave all the games to TSN to squeeze in between their other programming...perhaps they could have had another pre-game and post-game show on one of the terrestrial networks...what a concept? Not original I know, but it works for the NHL in Canada and the NFL in the states.