Big Picture

On the contrary they're all important. Those results determine the playoff seeding which gives the top teams the best chance to win through and play for the championship. I really don't see what part of that you don't understand.

How many of those players have a link other than heritage to those countries though? And how many of the heritage guys are just one generation removed rather than two?

Winning from 6th requires that team to play and beat three better teams in successive weeks, all away from home. If they can pull that off, what's diabolical about it?

I meant scrums formed like theirs are, the forwards low to the ground and pushing forward. Seeing how messy those are too showed me that wouldn't work.

There was a time when I thought a 12 player version of modern RU scrums might be the answer for that part of the game. Then I watched a little bit of modern RU and saw how tedious and prone to collapse their scrums are and came to my senses.

If the London public resists or looks down on "anything 'Northern'" advertising the game's Northern roots could put them off it.

That being the case, London's "Not Just a Northern Thing" marketing might be a mistake.

That was to keep the short-lived WFL out, it prompted the franchise granted to Toronto to move to Memphis and wasn't passed. Some years later Toronto businessman and politician Paul Godfrey, who landed the city's major league baseball franchise, put a lot of effort into pursuing an NFL franchise but nothing came of that.

The CFL’s problem is that decades of importing rules and other practices from the US have turned it into the gridiron equivalent of Triple-A baseball and the AHL. To everyone other than its' remaining fans it's a quirky minor league variant of the US game. They have reason too: the mode of play, positions, skillset and ball are all exactly the same as in the US game, which is why the CFL is dominated by coaches and players from the US who'd all rather be in the NFL but aren't good enough. By definition that's a minor league, and minor leagues don't draw well in Toronto, Montréal or Vancouver. They don't appeal to the younger generation either.

Of course it will, such as stipulations about the quality of broadcast required. It doesn't automatically follow that Sky's contract with SL restricts which channels they put the matches on though. Considering Sky's position as the only bidder most times the contract was nearing its end, that particular restriction seems very unlikely to me. But as neither of us has seen the restrictions in the contract, we'll have to disagree for now.

You're aware of such minutiae are you? Then by all means show me where the current contract restricts Sky's use of the content which Sky is paying for, if you can that is. Bearing in mind that Sky has been the only interested party in most past negotiations and that SL is really just cheap filler for them now, nothing less could convince me.

On the contrary, it's preposterous to think that Sky would have accepted a contract limiting its options for where to show the content it's paying to acquire. And the two reports about the contract linked higher up in the thread only say that 61 of the matches each season are exclusive to Sky which plainly means that only Sky can show them and nothing other than that.

Yes of course. I've only seen the terms reported in those linked news reports, have you seen the contract to know it's different from what those say?

Will any of them value the rights more highly than Sky though? They'll know how big an audience Sky is attracting and its value based on that. Dreams of offers almost 1-1/2 times more than last time are probably fanciful.

They can have more on the main channels now if they want. The terms described in those linked reports don't stop them. What they do is limit 61 matches to Sky only. The 21 million £ covers all matches.