U.S. FOOTBALL PLAYER POOL DILUTED
New leagues provide added competition for CFL teams looking to land Americans
Now is the spring of the Canadian Football League’s discontent. Next year might be worse.
The free agent player pool has been diluted significantly by the eight-team Alliance of American Football, which got rolling here and in Orlando on Saturday.
With 52 players on each AAF roster, all signed to three-year deals, there are 416 fewer Americans up for grabs this year than last. And the AAF isn’t alone in the spring space.
The Gridiron Football League, an indoor loop with 12 franchises, begins its 16-game season in late March. Team rosters are limited to 28 players, but that’s still another 336 players out of the pool.
Sometime this spring the Arena Football League will launch a 12-game schedule with six teams, up two from last year but down from the all-time high of 19 in 2007. Their rosters will eat up more players.
Next year promises additional competition as Vince Mcmahon seems committed to relaunching the XFL; and something called Major League Football looms.
Former CFLER Mike Mccarthy, one of its executives, said they’re trying to get up and running this year, but it seems unlikely.
Add it up and soon there won’t be enough top-notch pros to go around.
“Frankly, no, not for that many leagues,” said AAF co-founder Bill Polian. “I think the USFL proved that the CFL can coexist with the NFL and a spring league. When you get beyond that, I don’t know that everybody isn’t diluted, very honestly.”
CFL general managers are already dealing with the AAF financial reality. Contracts average US$83,000, excluding bonuses, which is far better than the Canadian money most CFL teams are willing to pay American rookies.
It wasn’t the AAF’S intent to outbid the CFL, but it’s a bother.
“Really, it’s a function of what we felt we could pay in the markets we were in to give them something that would say, ‘hey I’m a football player and I can earn a living and I can feed my family,’” Polian said. “So not counting bonuses, we’re about $20,000 above the median income in the country. That’s where we wanted to go. It had nothing to do with the CFL.”
CFL teams are losing players off their 45-man negotiation lists and being put off by others who normally would have turned to the CFL after failing to sign in the NFL.
“Certainly, there is a quarterback or two, there is a running back or two, guys in a couple of cases that we were actually conversing with about coming up here and then they opted to go with the Alliance and give that a whirl,” said Ottawa Redblacks GM Marcel Desjardins. His Edmonton counterpart, Brock Sunderland, said he quit counting after 15 players on the Eskimos’ neg list committed to the AAF.
“I just figured, hey, this is what we’re up against, so it doesn’t do any good to tally that all the time. But even this week and last week, as I’m looking for guys that we call ‘on the street,’ they’re at camp with these teams or on their roster.
“We have a number of players right now on our neg list who are going to be draft eligible this year and they’re telling us they’ll wait until they see where the NFL draft went. That makes sense. You hear that every year.
The challenge becomes a year from now when the XFL is back up and running. I guess you’ve got to dig that much deeper at that point.
“But the conundrum now, if it’s not the NFL, it used to be we could get them. It’s a pretty easy sell and a pretty easy transaction. Now it’s, ‘well, there’s the AAF and I’m going to consider that.’ ”
CFL teams will have to beat more bushes and turn over more rocks. Each year, about 16,000 U.S. college players become eligible for the NFL draft, slightly more than 250 get the call, and the vast majority enter free agency.
The supply comes from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which has 125 teams in Football Championship Series conferences and 130 in Football Bowl Series conferences. Those are the Division 1 players, and the AAF is chock full of them.
There are also 167 Division 2 programs and 250 Division 3 programs, 65 junior college teams and 92 National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics schools playing football.
“We’re of the opinion right now that there are certainly enough players to be found,” said Desjardins.
“The challenge becomes a year from now when the XFL is back up and running. I guess you’ve got to dig that much deeper at that point.”
Commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s CFL 2.0 initiative, which has produced working agreements with four Nordic and three European nations and Mexico, may uncover another pool of players in time. For now he is monitoring the AAF effect.
“I do think it’s something we have to watch, and it’s why opening up another supply line of players from around the world can be very powerful for us, not to ever take away from our desire to have great American players,” said Ambrosie.
“When we add our Canadian content and potential international content to our rosters, that can only ensure we have performances as good as we always have had and in the long term maybe even better.”