Bulls & Bears: Grey Cup leads list of pigskin nirvana while droopy Leafs sack Babcock
Credit to Author: Gord Kurenoff| Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2019 23:30:30 +0000
It’s a bull market on football. On a weekend that will include everything from the 107th Grey Cup in Calgary and the 55th Vanier Cup in Quebec City to NFL matchups such as Dallas at New England and Green Bay at San Francisco, to Week 13 in U.S. college football, it’s a great time to be a gridiron fan.
After divisional finals that averaged 800,000 in the east and 1.62-million in the west, a competitive game between two teams that are both desperate to break league-leading droughts (Hamilton 19 years and Winnipeg 29) should keep Sunday’s Grey Cup north of 3M in average national viewership.
Gone are the days of national audiences of 6M plus — it was Canada’s largest annual TV event until Super Bowl XLIV in 2010 — but the Grey Cup is such an essential part of Canadiana that it is virtually guaranteed to be among the top five television shows of the year in Canada.
In fact, were it not for the Toronto Raptors’ historic run to the NBA championship in June, Sunday’s Grey Cup would likely rank second only to Super Bowl LIII among the largest Canadian sport TV audiences in 2019.
Yet despite how big a weekend it is in football, there has been nothing hotter this week than Canada’s Davis Cup men’s national tennis team. In the first year of a new format that brings together the top-18 countries in the world for a week-long showcase in Madrid, Canada has already qualified for next year’s finals by reaching the final four.
With veteran Milos Raonic and top-ranked Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime injured, Denis Shapavalov and Vasek Pospisil have been studs for Canada in wins over Italy, the U.S. and Australia to set up a Davis Cup semifinal matchup against Russia on Saturday.
It’s yet another huge fan-building opportunity for Canadian tennis after a year in which Bianca Andreescu won three major tournaments — including the Rogers Cup and the U.S. Open — and players such as Auger-Aliassime revealed themselves as potential future champions.
What makes it particularly interesting for Tennis Canada is that it combines individual star power with the appeal of athletes officially representing their countries in international team competition.
If Canada wins the Davis Cup, it will be one of the biggest triumphs in Canadian sport history, let alone tennis history. If Canada falls short, it will have certainly served notice that it will be among the shortlist of global contenders for several years to come given the team’s youth and depth.
It has been a bad week for Mike Babcock but it has been a worse week for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Firing a head coach in mid-season is rarely a proud moment for a professional sport franchise. Yet here they are, carrying Babcock’s $6M salary — the highest in the NHL — for the rest of this season while gambling that rookie head coach Sheldon Keefe can do for the Maple Leafs what he’s done for the Marlies in recent years.
Keefe starts with a clean slate in the eyes of some of the star players who didn’t seem to connect with Babcock and he builds on a long-standing relationship with general manager Kyle Dubas, something Babcock simply didn’t have.
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