CFL schedule features late home debuts for Hamilton and Ottawa, which should help stadium construction, but carries trade-offs

There's plenty to discuss with Wednesday's release of the CFL schedule for 2014 (almost a month ahead of when it came out last year), including the nine-team schedule that sees one team have a bye every week (that's going to be a big change), the first game being Toronto in Winnipeg on Thursday, June 26 (really, the league wants to start the season off with a Bombers' team that went 3-15 last year?), the Grey Cup rematch between Hamilton and Saskatchewan on Sunday, June 29, the return of a Labour Day Classic double-header (after the first year since 1949 without one) with Toronto-Hamilton and Edmonton-Calgary on Monday, September 1, less stupid midweek home games for the Toronto Argonauts (the Blue Jays' schedule has caused plenty of these in the past, but the league schedulers have done well to work around that this year; there's only one Argonauts' midweek home game, on Tuesday, August 12), and the final four weeks being intradivisional play only. However, one of the most interesting things on this schedule is like Sherlock Holmes' "curious incident of the dog in the night-time"; something that didn't happen. That would be early home games in their new stadiums for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Ottawa Redblacks.

Both the Tiger-Cats and Redblacks are opening new stadiums this year, with Tim Hortons Field going up in Hamilton on the site of the old Ivor Wynne Stadium and Ottawa's new TD Place being built in Lansdowne Park on the site of the old Frank Clair Stadium. However, CFL fans will have to wait quite a while to see the new stadiums. Redblacks' fans won't get to see the new expansion team play a home game until Week Four, when they host the Toronto Argonauts on Friday, July 18, while Tiger-Cats' fans won't get to check out their team's new digs until they host Ottawa in Week Five, on Saturday, July 26. That's a substantial wait in both cases. It's somewhat logical, but it does carry potential problems.

The thinking would appear to be scheduling late starts in both cities in case of construction problems, and that makes some sense. We've seen those before, notably in Winnipeg during the 2012 season where the Bombers were expected to move to Investor's Group Field partway through, but wound up postponing that until 2013 thanks to construction delays. That situation was a black eye for the CFL, and if either of these fields isn't ready to go when expected, it would be even worse, as unlike in Winnipeg where the old Canad Inns Stadium was still available, there's no real alternative in either Ottawa or Hamilton. Those stadiums have to be ready when called upon, so providing as much time as possible to make that happen seems like a solid plan. (It's interesting that that's still a worry, though, as Hamilton's stadium was being built all last season, forcing the team to play in Guelph, and Ottawa's stadium has also been under construction for some time.)

However, as with most things in life, there's a trade-off here. Having the first home games for these teams come in Week Four and Week Five can be somewhat problematic from the standpoint of attracting casual fans. There's always a lot of national buzz around the start of a CFL season, but that excitement is going to be substantially dissipated by the time Ottawa and Hamilton get to play home games. Season-ticket holders and hardcore fans will come regardless of when the games are scheduled, but some potential casual fans in both cities may lose interest in the delay between the season starting and the first home game. That's a far less disastrous outcome than having an earlier game where the stadium didn't prove to be ready, of course, so this trade-off is probably worth it for the CFL. It just means that fans in Ottawa and Hamilton will be kept waiting a little longer for the return of CFL football than they might have anticipated.