From Day 1, new Canadian Football League Commissioner Randy Ambrosie has said he wants the league to be more open and create more to talk about with the fans, especially in the off season.
This current CFL off season is one of the busiest in recent memory, so to a certain extent, that’s mission accomplished for Ambrosie.
On Tuesday, CFL conversations centred around players like Robert Griffin III, Colin Kaepernick and Baker Mayfield — all among the 10 players each team was mandated to make public from their 45-man negotiation list.
This list has never been public.
The list changes almost daily but could eventually make up about 25 per cent of the average CFL roster. It’s an important part of building a team for all CFL clubs.
General managers have reluctantly all gone along with the league mandate. Eskimos’ vice-president of football and general manager, Brock Sunderland, knows there are pros and cons to releasing some of the negotiation list players’ names.
“I’m a little indifferent,” he answered when asked his thoughts on pulling back the curtain on the negotiation lists.
“From a fan’s perspective, I completely understand they want to see who is out there and it creates a little bit of buzz in the off season and you can get excited about potential players.”
Sunderland stressed the word “potential,” noting that the list is very fluid and the majority of the players on the list don’t end up playing for that team.
LISTEN: Eskimos’ general manager on negotiation list reveal
“If you look at the status reports every day, guys are on and off left and right. For fans to fixate on one player and say, ‘He is going to be here’ — it’s not always the case. It creates a lot of hypothetical scenarios.
“The truth is until a player actually signs it’s hypothetical, but it’s good for the league and it creates interest right now.”
Traditionally, CFL general managers have been against releasing names on the negotiation list — not to hide it from each other or from the fans, but to hide it from the player and his agent.
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There is a 10-day rule that comes with being placed on a negotiation list. A player can invoke that 10-day window, giving a team a deadline to either offer him a contract or release him from their list.
For Sunderland, that’s where it can be detrimental to business.
“If a player that you aren’t ready to bring in invokes the 10-day rule, it could put us in a difficult position.
“That’s the biggest resistance we have from a GM perspective: it could put us in a difficult position to have to move off a player to create space.”
For that and other reasons, the players’ names that were released this week were likely chosen for very strategic reasons by each club.
Having to name just 10 of 45 players on the list, teams will still be able to keep their secrets and players will still be traded for a “neg list player” and probably never know who that player was. Teams can still watch players develop from an early age and in some cases, Sunderland says a very early age.
“When I was with the Alouettes, we put a player on the neg list in his senior year of high school.”
He wouldn’t say who the player was but did say he played in the CFL and played very well.
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