What the Canadian Football League should do.

I enjoyed the first episode of this podcast with Davis Sanchez, Milt Stegall and Luke Willson … www.youtube.com/watch - three smart, opinionated guys, at least two of whom know the CFL pretty well.

I appreciated their perspectives. But …. ex pro football players are not the ones buying the majority of the tickets in a gate-driven league.

Football experts are not the main ones you need to get to come to the games. There aren’t enough of them to fill the building.

You ALSO need to appeal to casual fans who just want to be entertained, and I’d argue that is more important.

That might require a different strategy beyond modifying the rouge, changing the import ratio or arguing about salary caps.

You need to sell the entire game day experience. Tailgates, cheerleaders, game day stunts, interesting food choices, giveaways, look how easy it is to get here in the train, etc. That is AT LEAST as important as debates about defensive schemes or blown assignments.

Why should people come to the stadium, instead of watching on TV? Because it’s an enjoyable experience!

I will die on this hill. The solution to CFL attendance problems isn’t to argue about detailed on field football issues - the rouge, the salary cap, defensive schemes, etc. The solution is to sell the whole game day experience, to get people to come to the stadium for an enjoyable day out.

There aren’t enough football zealots to fill any building in the league. You need to work harder to appeal to casual fans. We’ve seen that just putting a championship team on the field isn’t enough, unfortunately.

Look at the Savannah Bananas. Selling out huge stadiums. Is it the best baseball? No. Is it tremendously entertaining? Sure is.

I’m not suggesting modifying weird rules, the way the Bananas do - although it’s fun to imagine that a field goal doesn’t count if a fan catches it.

But the Bananas have this “Fan First” philosophy. They realize that baseball is an entertainment product. And so is football, and the movies, and going to a concert, and and and.

Why should people come to the stadium instead of watching on TV? Because it’s a fun, shared, group experience.

Let’s not lose sight of that.

Tongue Light

(App Store link coming soon. this is a placeholder for the required tech support / privacy page.)

Tongue Light is a simple iPhone app that uses the front-facing camera on the phone to detect if your tongue is sticking out; once your tongue is out more than halfway, it will turn on the torch light on the back of the phone and light up the screen - and, optionally, play a sound.

Tap the screen for some settings. You can choose whether sticking out your tongue

• turns on/off the torch light on the back of the phone;
• changes the screen from black to white;
• displays a face emoji that flips from tongue-in “🙂” to tongue-out “😛” ;
• plays an ahh-OOO-gah sound.

The settings view also display a live graph of the detected position of your tongue, from 0.0 (in) to 1.0 (out.) Once your tongue crosses the 0.5 point, the selected actions happen.

Tongue Light will probably also work on an iPad, provided you’re in full-screen mode, but it won’t work if you are multitasking.

Privacy

Tongue Light collects no personal information of any kind. It uses the front-facing camera and Apple’s ARKit framework to detect the position of your tongue, but it does not actually snap or save any pictures or other personal information.