Now I'm even more curious, why wouldn't it work? Surely New Jersey/ New York have a rivalry?
Because New Jersey is essentially just a suburb of New York City. Newark, East Rutherford, etc... are like boroughs of NYC. On top of this New York State has like 20 million people in it so any team that tries to call itself the state team but bases itself in NYC automatically fails because there is NYC and then the rest of New York. For instance, try getting someone from Buffalo to cheer for a team based in NYC.... ain't gonna happen.
In Canada the provincial model works a little bit better because of our more rural population but again you run into the problem of under-representation of certain groups which ****** people off. Take our Canadian Rugby Championship for instance. In Ontario we have the Ontario Blues but realistically it should be called the Toronto Blues because almost nobody from Ottawa or the rest of Eastern Ontario plays for them. Little Guy alluded to the CFL and yes some CFL teams are based on a regional model; however, even then their is talk of doing away with that. The Saskatchewan Roughriders are based in Regine but also draw their fans from Saskatoon. Football is so popular in Saskatchewan that Saskatoon is talking about wanting their own team.
Personally I think the way forward for pro rugby in North America is to take the CRC and merge it with a relevant American organization and build them game up together. Canada and the US also need to sort out their club competitions and Canada especially needs to sort out its university game. Regionalism hurts rugby in Canada, especially when every province and every union wants their own piece of the pie. Like why the heck would they put the Atlantic Rock in NFLD? Their are
four club teams in NFLD...
yes four and they base one of our four regional teams there. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia, NB, PEI and Quebec (yes our second biggest province and which is a few thousand miles away from newfoundland) have a
combined 47+ club teams.
Two of our most successful players of late .... i.e. Jebb Sinclair and Chauncey O`Toole are from New Brunswick and played for the loyalists but had to move their asses all the way to NFLD and then Victoria to get a look at because our recruitment system and union infighting are so bad they wouldn`t have got a look otherwise. Imagine if we based our rugby decisions less on oldboy politics and actually worked on fostering our club game? Maybe we would be able to find 5 or 10 Jebb Sinclair`s in rural NB and NS?
This is a rant but regional rugby does not work in Canada, we are too spread out and it gets far too political to make it viable. I think regional rugby works in a place like Ireland because its very small and you can drive across the island in 5 or 6 hours. I grew up in one of our smallest provinces and it takes that long to drive across it. Right now it takes me 17 hours to drive home everytime I want to visit my family just to give you an idea of how big this country is.
