Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

No, these aren't the King Philip Warriors. They're the Edmonton Elks of the CFL.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering after wiping a few tears from my eyes while watching Jimmy Kimmel's sincere and emotional monologue upon returning to the ABC airwaves last night ... 

** Big changes are coming north of the border, as the Canadian Football League will be making some radical alterations to their peculiar brand of pigskin coming soon.

The most noticeable change will be in the fields themselves. The CFL, over the next two years, will reduce the size of their fields in the hope that a shorter playing surface will spur the teams into scoring more touchdowns, and fewer field goals.

Instead of the current 110-yard layout -- and who wasn't just a little puzzled by that yard line marked "C" on those fields? -- the CFL field will be reduced to the American distance of 100 yards. And the CFL end zones, currently an expansive 20 yards each, will be trimmed to 15 yards each. That's still plenty of room for a spritely wide receiver to run around in all day until he gets open for his quarterback, but the field-goal kickers will hate it. The CFL will also move the goal posts from the goal line to the end line. 

So, if your team stalls at the 20-yard line, your kicker will no longer have a 27-yard chip shot to post three points on the board. And unlike American football, where that kick covers 37 yards to be successful, the extra yardage will make the CFL kick traverse 42 yards.

Those are huge changes for the CFL, which has jealously guarded its uniqueness since its founding in 1958. But it's not the first time that our neighbors from the Great White North have had to fool around with field dimensions.

Back in the early 1990s, before the CFL and NFL finally reached a cooperative agreement that pumped much-needed revenue into the former (and basically saved it from oblivion), the Canadians get the bright idea that the path to salvation was to expand southward -- to establish CFL franchises in American cities that were unserved or lesser served by the NFL and hopefully seize upon the apparent thirst for more football that was sweeping our nation.

The first such effort came in the 1993 founding of the Sacramento Gold Miners in California's state capital. The next year, three other American cities joined the mix -- but as a result of shaky finances, facility issues and tepid fan interest, teams moved from city to city willy-nilly before the expansion effort was scrapped after the 1995 season.

Baltimore QB Tracy Ham led a winner.

By the time this grand experiment ended, CFL teams had played from home bases in seven American cities -- Sacramento, Baltimore (which had just lost the Colts to Indianapolis), Las Vegas, Memphis, Birmingham, Shreveport and San Antonio. Plans to add five more teams (including Milwaukee, Houston and Miami) were scrapped when the expansion bubble popped.

Only one of those teams, the Baltimore Stallions, accomplished anything. Originally named the "CFL Colts" but forced to shed that identity by the NFL, the Stallions averaged nearly 30,000 fans a game at the old Memorial Stadium and won the Grey Cup championship in 1995. When expansion pooped the bed at the end of that season, most of that team's organization was shipped up to Montreal to undertake the revival of the Alouettes franchise, which had been discontinued.

Many of you may not know this, but there was a brief flirtation with Foxboro Stadium as a potential CFL host site. But no matter how they tried, they just couldn't find a way to squeeze anything close to a regulation CFL field (especially its 65-foot width) into that small footprint without demolishing parts of the stands on all four sides. As it was, four of the teams playing in the U.S. had to play with shorter end zones because the stadiums could not accommodate 150 yards of playing surface from endline to endline. 

There will be a few more changes to the CFL game once these are implemented. The between-plays play clock will be increased from 20 to 35 seconds, and the beloved "rouge" -- the one-point benefit for kicking the ball out of the opponent's end zone, will become much harder to achieve. Someone will actually have to field a missed field goal or a punt in the end zone and take a knee to get one lousy point. 

But there will still be only three downs instead of four, 12 players on the field for each team, and the chaos of unlimited motion before the snap. Pass the Labatt's and the poutine! It will still be recognizable as the CFL, eh?

It has not been said whether all of this will change again once Donald Trump makes Canada the 51st U.S. state. Maybe the next step will be a franchise in Greenland.

** My favorite moment of Jimmy Kimmel's monologue on Tuesday was when he said he had been asked by Disney to read a statement. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a note, looked at the camera and said with a straight face, "To re-activate your Disney-Plus and Hulu account ..." 

Priceless.

Oh, and I did pick up on Kimmel's reference to another famous moment in late-night talk show history, when his first words to the audience were "As I was saying before I was interrupted ..."

On March 7, 1960, "Tonight" host Jack Paar returned to the NBC stage after a month's absence, having walked off his show in protest over the network's censors cutting off a telecast because of a joke that included a reference to a W.C. (water closet, otherwise known as bathroom). It took a month of very public negotiations for Paar to return, and those were the exact same words he said when he stepped through the curtain to begin his monologue.

Drake Maye: He's improving.

** Please, people, enough with all this panic over Drake Maye and the Patriots' 1-2 start. It's way too early to jump off the Zakim Bridge.

Yes, that was a pretty bad performance on Sunday against the Steelers, sloppy and a little on the undisciplined side. But you must remember, Bill Belichick was 5-11 in his first season with the Patriots. Nothing good happens overnight.

It has been my experience to see that young players improve significantly between their first and second years in the league. Maye has done that. The rest of the team has to catch up, and this is with an entirely new coaching staff. To me, the entire operation appeared to be more organized and more proficient than it was a year ago. Let it all come together.

Tom Brady isn't walking through that door. And if he was, he'd be wearing Armani and Ray-Bans -- and would still be part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders.

Matt Patricia was never this close.

** Speaking of Bill Belichick, how embarrassing must it be to be him? His North Carolina team absolutely sucks and he looks like a fool to have his granddaughter -- er, his young girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, racing over to comfort him at the end of each miserable loss.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in those meetings of the UNC regents, when someone says, "What the hell did we spent all this money for, to get some geriatric fool who keeps his hot young piece of (expletive deleted) on the sidelines?" While that may be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, I have to wonder if those with less of a fixation on Ms. Hudson's physiology might be wondering if indeed, the one-time greatest coach of all time has lost his marbles. Ask someone that watched the Patriots over his post-Brady tenure, and they knew all along that North Carolina was getting less than advertised.

And let's face it. The 2000-18 Bill Belichick would not have had his wife or girlfriend on the sidelines with him to usher him off the field. 

Try retirement on for size, Bill. It's far less stressful. And while it may cost you the hot young piece of whatever, maybe Linda Holliday will take you back. At least she's more age-appropriate.

** I'm not ashamed to admit that I voted for Kamala Harris in the last election. I would have voted for a roast beef sandwich from Arby's if I thought it had a chance to defeat Donald Trump and prevent what our nation is going through at this very moment.

Harris' tell-all book is bad for her party.

But I am not a fan of the former vice president trashing her party in her recently published book, a diary of her brief time on the campaign trail after replacing President Biden at the top of the ticket. Any thought that she could return as the Democrats' nominee in 2028 have been dismissed upon her admission that she dismissed Pete Buttigieg as a potential vice-presidential nominee because she believed that a ticket with a black woman and a gay man could not beat Trump.

She may have been correct -- intolerance was definitely a key factor in the 2024 election -- but that's not the sort of thing that Democrats need to hear or to speak out loud as they seek unity and strength to mount the most important challenge ever to a sitting president (and yes, I believe that if Trump is still alive, he will try to run again in 2028).

By the way, at the same time Jimmy Kimmel was returning to the airwaves on Tuesday, Stephen Colbert had California Gov. Gavin Newsom as his guest. I was able to catch about half of the interview, and it was clear that Newsom is preparing for a run as a centrist candidate for the presidency -- not necessarily rejecting the Democrats' left-wing power brokers, but trying to open the doors to those on the right that have grown weary of Trump's politics of vengeance.

I'm not necessarily enamored with Newsom -- after all, he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle for five years, which could indicate a lapse in judgment -- but given that the electorate is still reluctant to elect a qualified woman, and some of the Dems' most qualified individuals are seen as too progressive to make inroads in the red states, he may be emerging as the front-runner for the nomination this early in the process. What he says, and how he intends to reach out to supporters and detractors alike, is of great importance to our nation.

That is, of course, if Trump doesn't invoke martial law before then, and suspend all elections to facilitate his coronation. 

Bill Parcells

** I was not able to attend the ceremony in which Bill Parcells and Julian Edelman were inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame, but I did listen in my car through the magic of streaming audio. I am very glad to see that the angst over Parcells' departure to the New York Jets has finally given way to a full appreciation of his value to the health, welfare and future of a moribund franchise that was destined to depart for elsewhere.

It was very poignant when Parcells said to the assembled crowd that he would always have warm memories of his time here, and that in retrospect, maybe there were some things that he could have done differently at the time. Personally, I believe there were things others should have done to facilitate the desired result as well, but that's all water under the bridge. The fact is, I'm glad that Parcells lived long enough (and me as well) to experience the moment when those "others" acknowledged that they could have done things better as well.

** There will be a good game on North TV's Community Channel this Friday as the 3-0 King Philip Warriors visit the 3-0 Foxboro Warriors at Jack Martinelli Field, a 7 p.m. start. The game will also be fed to cable systems in Wrentham and Norfolk as well as to North Attleboro and Plainville, and streamed at community.northtv.net.

These teams always seem to be unbeaten or close to it when they meet for their annual non-league contest. Doesn't matter if they're not in the same Hockomock League division, they play like it's for all the marbles. Join Del Malloy and me for all the action if you can.

Until next we meet, then ...

MARK FARINELLA, a long-time fan of CFL football, is happy that the King Philip Warriors wear uniforms that resemble those of the old Edmonton Eskimos (now Elks). Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com, eh?