CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie was in Calgary on Tuesday for the first stop on his second annual “Randy’s road trip” in which he holds town halls in all nine of the league’s markets (and a potential market in Halifax.) While it’s billed as a way for Ambrosie to listen and interact with fans, this year’s edition will be heavily scrutinized due to the number of key issues the league is facing.
With CBA negotiations approaching, player safety on the front burner and the CFL 2.0 initiative getting mixed reviews, much of what Ambrosie says will be parsed for indications of where the league might be headed. For Ambrosie, it’s an opportunity to frame the league’s arguments on these issues as a representation of the everyday fans view of things – whether that’s true or not.
As part of his Calgary stop, Ambrosie did an interview with Jock Wilson at 770 CHQR, the station that owns the rights to Calgary Stampeders broadcasts. The entire discussion is worth a listen but there were a couple things that Ambrosie touched on – and how he framed them – that caught my interest.
Wilson started by asking what Ambrosie is hearing from fans and the commissioner acknowledged that the CBA is top of mind for everyone. This answer is being framed as “Ambrosie won’t guarantee the season will start on time,” but it was more innocuous than that.
“They want a personal promise that we’ll get the league started on time for 2019 season,” Ambrosie said. “There’s only two guarantees in life, death and taxes. I’m an optimist, I love the players, I feel like I’ve got the best intentions of the league in the players at heart, I want to grow revenues so ultimately we can reward our owners, we can reward our players and our coaches and everybody that’s involved in the game.”
Ambrosie then parroted a line of thinking he’s used before and essentially lays the March start to negotiations at the players’ feet – a position the union doesn’t necessarily share – but said timing is not a barrier to reaching a deal before the season starts.
“I’m looking forward to the start of negotiations in what should be about three weeks time and personally, I’m expecting a great outcome,” he said. “Starting in early March is more than early enough to get this done.”
Ambrosie also used the question about what he was hearing from fans to frame potential changes to replay as the will of the people.
“The questions and the feedback today not materially different than before. People want to talk about challenge flags… fans would like to see us go one challenge with one more if you’re successful,” he said. “Quarterback safety was another thing that fans wanted to talk about today and were curious as to what we’re thinking of doing in 2019 to continue to improve the safety of our players.”
There were a couple of interesting tidbits on free agency as well: one, that Ambrosie thinks fans want more stability in the rosters and two, that he recognizes that divulging salaries generates interest from even casual CFL fans.
“I thought this year’s class of free agents was really big and I was worried about that much movement. One of the things that reminds me of is that they’d like a little more stability in are rosters. I hear that quite frequently,”
“it’s interesting how public some of the new deal’s became this year and it became the subject of a lot of water cooler discussions, not even just amongst existing CFL fans but new and potential fans who went ‘wow, did you see how much money some of these players are getting paid’.
“I think it’s something we have to take a step back and reflect on a little bit before we decide if it was good or bad. It was definitely more in-your-face this year than we’ve seen in the past,”
Of course, the league is as much to blame for the massive amount of player movement as the players are: the CFL agreed to one-year contracts as part of collective bargaining, nuked the NFL window (which it eventually re-instated) and has kept the minimum salary at a level that encourages players to constantly seek a better pay day.
But Ambrosie punted when asked about the salary cap going up.
“We’ve really got to resist the desire to state positions before we release it in a respectful environment with the players but I’ve heard the same thing, I’ve heard people talk about it.”
Finally, Ambrosie addressed CFL 2.0, particularly the issue of how players from all these football federations from around the globe will be accounted for on the roster. While it makes logical sense that they will be “internationals” that means they will have to take spots from predominantly American players who make up 17 of 24 starters and may be tough to beat out for jobs. Having them count as “nationals” will pose its own challenges, including the potential reduction of Canadian content in the Canadian Football League.
What’s more is Ambrosie’s assertion that he doesn’t have a plan to do this, only that he sees an opportunity.
“That’s one of the big subjects we’ll talk to players about is, ‘how do we put this in?’ One of the things I’m going to share with the players is how big an effect going to an international roster model has been for professional sports.you look at the NHL and in 1996, 9.6% of the players were non-North American. That number has gone to 30 per cent and meanwhile compensation has gone up by several hundred per cent. The NBA has seen a dramatic rise in its revenues as a result of going to a more international approach,” he said. “I’m hoping we can share the vision for why this will be good for a league and the players and then find a way to get it done together. I don’t have a strategy for this I just think we want to sit with the players and share the opportunity and then hopefully work towards a way of doing it that’s going to make sense for everyone.”
Ambrosie has eight more of these town halls and countless other media interviews to go along with them. That’s a lot of opportunities to say something interesting at a very interesting time.
