Riders boss supports cap on operation expenses

TeAm president-CEO reCAlls when Riders struggled through finAnCiAl unCertAinty

Despite being a CFL financial powerhouse, the Saskatchewan Roughriders do not feel targeted by a league-imposed cap on football-operations expenses.

“The reality is, not at all,” Roughriders president-CEO Craig Reynolds said last week at the community-owned team’s annual general meeting.

“I think what finally happened is that we had the right level of financial transparency across the league, and that happened this winter.”

The CFL’s new rule puts a $2.738-million limit on salaries for coaches and football-operations staff. In addition, the number of coaches will be capped at 11, with the limit for football-operations staff being 17.

Until next season, teams can spend whatever they want on everyone except players, whose salaries have been capped since 2007.

The Roughriders certainly have the resources to spend freely. They have been hugely profitable for more than a decade and have taken advantage of opportunities to wield their monetary might.

“I remember when we weren’t in that situation — when we struggled to keep up,” Reynolds noted. “There were arms races going on with players and coaches with other organizations and we struggled as a result.”

Reynolds was reminded of a time when the Roughriders were strapped for cash. In 1997, for example, the team held a provincewide telethon to stay alive.

Fred Wagman, who headed the Roughriders’ board of directors when that telethon was held, was among the past presidents who attended the annual meeting.

“There was Tom Shepherd with lotteries and those types of things,” Reynolds added in reference to the former Roughriders president, who has operated the Friends of the Riders Touchdown Lottery since 1986.

“I’d listen to the telethons, just praying that we’d save the team because I was such a massive fan.”

The Roughriders’ resources have allowed them to absorb expensive buyouts when members of the football-operations staff were terminated with significant time remaining on their guaranteed contracts.

Since the announcement of the football-operations spending restrictions, questions have arisen about whether payments to fired employees would be included in the cap.

“There’s provisions in there around that (issue),” Reynolds said. “It’s probably too early to talk about those, but there’s the understanding that it poses a challenge when it comes to rebuilding your football team.

“That’s what we had to do in 2015 after we made some changes (firing head coach Corey Chamblin and general manager Brendan Taman). We had to rebuild our football team, and you have to do certain things.

“So there’s provisions within the cap that we’re working on right now and that we’re looking to finalize that will account for that, I would say, but allow you some flexibility.

“You could really cripple a team. The reality is that if a team is making a coaching change, they’re probably struggling a little bit, so you certainly don’t want to cripple a team.

“I think there was a recognition of that by the commissioner and the teams.”

There are also questions about expensive salaries that are currently being paid to the likes of Roughriders’ head coach, general manager and vice-president of football operations Chris Jones. Jones, like Toronto Argonauts head coach Marc Trestman, is reportedly earning in excess of $600,000 per year.

Reynolds was asked whether some of the existing contracts will be grandfathered to ease the transition to the new football operations cap.

“Right now, no,” he responded. “The plan is to move toward 2019 implementation.

“The reality is that it aligns with contracts across the league, so it doesn’t pose as massive of a challenge. But there are certain nuances that need to be worked out because, yeah, there were commitments made.

“In our situation, we have contractual commitments with all our football-ops folks that last into 2019, and we made those not knowing that this was coming. Certainly, there are nuances that we’ve got to work through with the league. It’s not just us, obviously. Other teams are impacted as well.”

Instead of focusing on the potentially negative consequences of the CFL’s new cap, Reynolds focuses on the positives.

“This is about having a good, strong, nine-team CFL,” he said. “It’s fine to have the resources that we have and the success we have, but if you don’t have a strong league or you don’t have a league to play in, then you have a real challenge.”