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The CFL's salary management system has been widely praised for forcing teams to adhere to its $4.2-million cap and helping ensure competitive balance across the league.
But several general managers believe the league needs to make the free-agent bidding process more transparent in order to erase any doubt about what is being paid to some players and keep teams from unnecessarily driving up salaries.
Montreal Alouettes general manager Jim Popp said this free-agent period has involved considerable disparity between what players and agents claim they are being offered by certain teams and then what's eventually written on the contracts filed with the league.
All of which he says fuels doubts about who's telling the truth and whether teams are fully disclosing what's being paid to a particular player.
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“There's got to be transparency,” Popp said. “When a guy becomes a free agent on Feb. 16th, the offers should be submitted to the CFL so that when he signs a contract, that contract comes back (registered) to the league looking the same.
“We're bidding against each other and we're not sure what we're bidding against. We're hearing a guy saying he's being offered all this money and you don't know if it's true. So to get him you may raise your costs when you don't have to.
“Transparency would erase the doubt about what's legit.”
Popp said his desire for transparency was heightened recently when several free agents turned down offers from Montreal, going elsewhere to sign contracts that were registered with the league for significantly less than the Als were offering.
“There's one reason a guy goes to free agency: to earn more money,” Popp said. “My eyebrows have been raised by what players and their agents tell me they're looking for and what's being offered and then a guy goes somewhere and the numbers don't add up. It doesn't mean it's not true. It's just hard to believe. And it causes me to raise my eyebrows and say we need transparency to see what's going on.”
One of the players Montreal is believed to have bid upon was their own free-agent defensive lineman Dario Romero, who signed with the Edmonton Eskimos. Edmonton coach and general manager Danny Maciocia acknowledges the Esks may have signed Romero for less money than he was offered by Montreal. But he insists more goes into a player's choice (including location and taxes) than simply the dollar amount on the contract.
Maciocia said he would welcome transparency in free agency as a means to erase any doubts.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I have no problem being up front, but I'm under the impression everything is being divulged. It's been made clear to me if we're not divulging it'll cost me my job. These are decisions players make on their own and it doesn't always mean more money.”
Popp may be the most outspoken general manager on the issue of wanting transparency in free agency but the concept has support from at least Hamilton's Bob O'Billovich, Saskatchewan's Eric Tillman and B.C.'s Wally Buono.
One idea is to give teams the right to match any offer for one of their players who shops himself on the open market. That would allow players to reach market value but would also ensure teams to be sure what they are bidding against.
“Any time a contract is registered (by another team) for a lower amount than what you know what you offered, there's always concern about is that the exact number?” Buono said. “I guess I equate it to instant replay which takes as much doubt out of a call on the field as possible. It would help us to have a mechanism in place that makes it easier for all of us to keep accountability as part of the (free agent) process. Is there a better mechanism to help us do our jobs? I would say we can improve on that drastically.”
Buono noted that any change to the free-agent process would have to be achieved through collective bargaining with the league's players' association. But with several teams concerned that some old habits of doing business may be creeping into the current system, that may be something the league is willing to get serious about.
“Everyone in this league agrees we need a salary cap,” Popp said. “But we need to have it fine tuned to be as clear as possible so that everybody believes what's going on.”
