11h ago
CFL makes each team’s full negotiation list public
For the first time ever, the CFL’s negotiation lists for its nine teams – the list of up to 45 pro or college players whose rights are protected by each team – have gone public on each team’s website, Dave Naylor writes.
By Dave Naylor
The Canadian Football League announced a change Wednesday that may not seem all that significant on the surface, but speaks to a much more meaningful shift in the league’s direction and way of thinking.
For the first time ever, the CFL’s negotiation lists for its nine teams – the list of up to 45 pro or college players per team whose rights are protected by each organization – have gone public on the league's website, CFL.ca.
Fans can now see who their favourite CFL teams are focused on for the future and track those players as well, something that’s been impossible up to now because of secrecy implemented with the very establishment of the modern CFL in 1958.
The secrecy surrounding negotiation lists has been a source of frustration for many fans and members of the CFL media for years. It’s a process that seemed simple and unnecessarily clandestine.
While the vast majority of Canadian CFL players come through the annual college draft, American talent comes through the neg list. When a CFL team sees a college or pro player it likes and believes might reasonably come to Canada at some point, they simply slap that player’s name on a negotiating list, giving them exclusive rights and taking away any leverage that player would have to bargain with another team.
Virtually every American CFL player of any significance comes to the league via the list. Players such as former Ticat Johnny Manziel and current Argonauts quarterback Chad Kelly sat on neg lists for years before coming to the CFL.
So, why all the secrecy?
Some suggested it had to do with the sensitivity of college teams to their players’ rights being owned by a professional team while they are still in school, which seems like an absolutely quaint notion in the days of NIL (name, image and likeness) deals.
Others suggested teams didn’t want American players to know their CFL rights were owned for fear they might demand to be signed before a team was ready to onboard them.
And some suggested that revealing which players CFL teams had their eyes on might provide an unwanted distraction to the players.
But everyone in professional football is going to be replaced at some point, and hiding the neg list was not that far removed from holding a draft in secret and refusing to tell anyone who the picks were.
The height of how ridiculous this got came in trades, where one half of a trade was sometimes secret, making it awfully difficult for fans to judge whether a team had got fair value.
Consider just one example.
In 1996, the Toronto Argonauts made a trade with the Calgary Stampeders, acquiring the rights to Tyrone Williams, a Canadian receiver who had spent time in the NFL, in exchange for what was reported back then as “a player on Toronto’s negotiation list.”
At the time, fans might reasonably have believed the Stamps got fleeced.
It turned out, however, that the player involved in the trade was the 1995 Walter Payton Award winner as the top player in FCS football that season, a quarterback from Montana named Dave Dickenson. But at the time of the trade his name couldn’t be revealed.
Under former commissioner Randy Ambrosie, teams revealed 10 of the 45 names on their lists twice a year – September and December – a move in the right direction, but one that attracted minimal attention and highlighted the absurdity of the other 35 names remaining secret.
Like many things in the CFL, tradition carried the day, even when the old arguments never made sense.
Now fans can go to any of the nine team websites and find out exactly who their teams have their eyes on for the future. And the moment a team adds a player or drops one, the public will see it instantaneously.
The actual impact of this may be minimal at least in the short term, but the significance of the move is not.
New commissioner Stewart Johnston promised to look under the hood at every aspect of the business and examine the why or why not in the way the league goes about its business.
Secret negotiations lists, a 67-year-old way of doing business that was badly outdated in today’s age, is the first meaningful change.
Here’s hoping it won’t be the last.