Another rebuilding project
Randy Ambrosie’s lofty plans for CFL 2.0 and sticky labour situation front and centre at winter meetings in Quebec
As Marc Dos Santos begins his first year with the Vancouver Whitecaps he will do so with just four players who scored for the club last season.
MONT-TREMBLANT, Que. — If positivity equalled success, CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie would be like a quarterback who connects on every deep ball he throws.
As the league’s presidents, general managers and coaches get set to convene with league executives in the resort of Mont-Tremblant, Que., this week, Ambrosie talks so positively, some might suggest he’s wearing rose-coloured ski goggles.
He talks about CFL 2.0, a vision he has for globalizing the three-down game, an upcoming combine and draft in Mexico, about expansion to Halifax, about sending Canadian university and junior players overseas to play and about cross-country tours to meet with the fans who make the league great.
Those are all good ideas, projects that will help grow the game inside and out of this country, where it has its hit-and-miss moments, and Ambrosie deserves credit for pursuing those initiatives, even in the face of persistent problems that threaten the future of the league.
While the big thinkers gather in Mont-Tremblant, the league is without a Collective Bargaining Agreement with its players and both sides are digging in for a fight. Ambrosie said negotiations with the CFL Players Association will begin soon, but no one knows right now how long that might take or whether it will affect training camps and the start of the 2019 season.
“We haven’t put any specific dates on the calendar but that will happen before too long,” Ambrosie said in an interview
Sunday.
“We’ve been exchanging e-mails with Brian (Ramsay) and Jeff (Keeping) from the PA. We all agreed we still have a little bit of work to do. It gives us a chance as well to really spend some time talking about what’s working and what’s not so that when we do sit down, we’re really at our best.”
The whole situation has certainly left a lot of players in limbo, with contracts expir- ing in February and little desire to sign new ones until a CBA is in place.
The league put a ban on off-season bonuses and that has many players wanting to sit tight until they know they can get the full extent of their compensation for next season.
“Got me over here contemplating retirement so that I can go do something to feed my family for this 6 months while y’all deny guys (their due) cause you want to squeeze us into taking whatever deal,” Calgary Stampeders offensive lineman Derek Dennis tweeted recently.
“I been trying find a job for a month … nobody won’t hire me cause I plan on continuing to play football and you got teams holding our bonuses. I already lost half my pay by converting it and you still out here paying coaches … I’m vexed right now.”
The CBA is not the only problem the league currently faces.
There’s also the issue of declining attendance. It went down across the league last season (23,856 league average, down 265 from last season) and was at its worst in the country’s three biggest markets — Toronto (14,211), Montreal (17,332) and Vancouver (19,975). Plus a new rival league — the Alliance of American Football — is competing for talent and paying decent wages in U.S. currency. Expansion and globalization are nice ideas, but there are certainly some critics out there who will say “Get your house in order first.”
Not Ambrosie.
“For the moment, like always, I’m quite excited and optimistic about the future,” he said.
He’s plowing ahead with his positive mindset that envisions a bigger, better league, one that is embraced inside and out of Canada’s borders.
Who’s to say he can’t pull it off?
It just seems a lot more people would believe it possible if some of the league’s traditional markets were embracing the game, if rival leagues weren’t threatening to siphon talent and if a new Collective Bargaining Agreement was in place to promise labour peace and prosperity over the next four or five years.
With that in mind, here’s a look at six hot button issues expected to be discussed at the CFL summit, which goes Tuesday-Thursday: AMBROSIE’S VISION
Until last year, this was a regularly scheduled CFL event for team presidents only. The league invited general managers to participate last year in Banff and added the head coaches this time around and Ambrosie plans to use the opportunity to get everyone up to speed on his vision for CFL 2.0.
“We launched the concept in the middle of last season and it’s not a great time to try to sit down face-to-face with the coaches, they’re all so busy,” Ambrosie said. “This is the perfect time, ahead of the Mexican combine, to sit down and talk about 2.0 and share our vision for a bigger CFL.”
The concept of CFL 2.0 gets its first real test this coming weekend when the CFL holds a combine and draft in Mexico City, with Ambrosie and two representatives of each CFL team in attendance. After that, Ambrosie says there are six European countries with football federations that have expressed interest in partnering with the CFL. The German federation will visit Canada later this month.
Ambrosie hopes this vision is appealing to the players as well.
“We will want to share our vision with the players and we’ve already been talking with them about it,” he said. “We’ll want to start the conversation with where we think we can go from here, how we can grow. I’m hoping that the players will find that inspiring. I’m hoping we’ll all get behind the idea of a bigger, stronger CFL and that will lead us to a good outcome.”
At least one general manager is looking forward to hearing more about Ambrosie’s long-range plans.
“It’s a time of change, which is a good thing,” Winnipeg Blue Bombers GM Kyle Walters said. “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. The commissioner has come in and he’s got his vision and we’re all getting on board and we’re all gonna see how we can make this work.”
ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS
Attendance was terrible in Toronto last season and it wasn’t a whole lot better in Montreal and Vancouver. It was down across the board and has been declining for years. The league is not blind to the problem.
“We’re gonna talk about it,” Ambrosie said. “We want to involve our coaches and GMs in the discussion about how we grow the game. How do we get more fans to experience just how great our game is, how do we create a better fan experience. Absolutely, that’s gonna be front and centre because it has to be talked about. CFL 2.0 is part of that.”
LABOUR SITUATION
The players want better wages, improved health and safety and post-career care for those with chronic injuries. They are ready to fight for those things, with many players wearing CFLPA t-shirts during the playoffs in November and talking tough in the off-season.
“Dear @CFL players, the ball is always in our hands, the league runs through us,” Toronto Argos running back James Wilder Jr., recently tweeted. “It’s no league without us. Remember that!!! If we want better conditions this CBA it should be easy, we know what to do. We ALL talk about it behind closed doors. COME TOGETHER & MAN UP!!!”
Ambrosie admits it’s a concern that there is no CBA currently and there’s talk of a potential disruption to training camps and the start of the season, but he’s confident a deal can be worked out.
“I want our teams to be at their absolute best when they go to training camp and start the season and anything that stands in the way of them doing that is a concern to me,” Ambrosie said.
“Ultimately I have lots of confidence that what the players want and what we want at the league are basically the same thing. We want a big, strong Canadian Football League, we want to grow the league.”
THAT NEW LEAGUE
There will be discussions about the impact of the Alliance of American Football on the CFL. The new four-down league began training camps this past weekend and its inaugural season will begin a week after the NFL’s Super Bowl.
“As of this point it’s not a factor for our pending free agents, more for our neg-list guys,” Walters said. “It’s more the young Americans that we’re trying to convince to come up here, who now have that other option. That’s the difference and the bigger impact for this league. It’s incoming players, not the retention of players.
“We’ve had a bunch of neglist guys that were interested in signing with the AAF. But what we’ve learned is there’s so many football players. The CFL teams have the history of the scouting and there’s quite a few players for us to pick from. Every team is gonna lose a couple here or there but you keep plugging away and trust in your scouting process and move on to the next one. We get told no a lot, or at least ‘Not right now.’
“We’re just hearing that a little bit more often this year.” HALIFAX UPDATE
While the Atlantic Schooners — a conditional expansion franchise — won’t be represented at the meetings, Ambrosie plans to provide an update on their progress in selling tickets and working toward building a stadium in Halifax.
“I will be meeting with them once I get back from Mexico,” Ambrosie said. “I want to do as much as I possibly can to make sure (the owners) are fully aware of what’s going on at the league. At a minimum, I’ll do an update just to give everyone a current lay of the land. Without a doubt it’s going to be a topic of discussion and it’s also something we’ll talk to the players about because if we’re bringing another team online, it’s going to create opportunities for more players.”
FOLLOW THE RULES
With the football operations personnel at the meetings, there will be an initial discussion on potential rule changes for 2019. It’s not a formal rules committee meeting, more of a feedback opportunity, Ambrosie said.
One thing that will come up for sure is the decision by Ambrosie to add an extra official during the 2018 playoffs, simply to watch for headshots on quarterbacks.
“It’s definitely something we’re gonna talk about,” he said.
“After we implemented that, we didn’t have an incident, but I want to talk about that a lot with the coaches and GMs and get their feedback. I’ll obviously want to talk to the players about that as well. Do we think about that extra official? do we eventually look at a more technology-oriented solution?”