CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie was asked in Winnipeg on Thursday night about the ongoing problems with the league’s statistics system.
“This is not a failure. This is what happens when you do a full technology reset. For all the fans, we certainly don’t want to disrespect their concerns, but my message is that we believe this is the right thing,” Ambrosie said.
The 60-year-old commish indicated his belief that the game-day system would work “reasonably good” this week, though it remains somewhat unstable with the new technology that’s being installed.
“When we started the conversation with Genius [Sports], the overall relationship that we started with them, one of the key tenets of that would be we would go through a significant technological upgrade across all things. One of the systems that they identified early on was our stats system, which was an old closed architecture, almost an analog type of system. We can’t do what we want to do with that platform — we couldn’t upgrade that platform,” Ambrosie said.
“Their recommendation and this goes back all the way to January 2022, was we basically needed to shut that system down and implement a whole new platform. This is what anyone in the technology world would say is a complete transformation. We’re doing it because what comes out the other side of this is going to be capabilities that frankly we couldn’t have dreamt of in the past. It’s going to allow us enhanced stats.”
The commish has been told the CFL’s game-day system will be working well come early July with player profiles and league-wide statistics being made available later in the month.
“I couldn’t emphasize this enough and I don’t want to diminish the significance of it not being as good as everyone wants it to be today, but this is an investment in our future. This is about building an entirely new system that is going to take us into the future. It’s about enhanced statistics; this new system will be able to connect with a chipped football. When you see a pass of seven yards, the new system will show you where on the field it went, it’ll show you the velocity of the football when it was thrown,” Ambrosie explained.
“But my message to everyone: it’s going to be worth it because this is an investment for the long-term future of the CFL. One of the things that we’ve been talking about is trends, transitioning from a short-term focus to a long-term mindset. While it’s been disruptive, I think in the long term, we’ll look back on this and say it was well worth the effort. A little short-term pain for some great long-term gains.”
The 109th Grey Cup was played on Sunday, November 20 last year and the 2023 season kicked off on Thursday, June 8. That’s exactly 200 days for a statistics system switch to occur during the offseason, which is over six months.
“It wasn’t left late. I hope that you don’t think I’m sounding defensive, I’m not intending on being defensive at all. I’m actually very encouraged given the magnitude of the project. Going all the way back to January 2022, Genius, who is the world leader in this technology, told us this was going to take time,” Ambrosie said.
“We did a lot of testing during the winter. One of the questions I’ve been asked is well, ‘Why didn’t you run a redundant system?’ ‘Why didn’t you run the old system and the new system?’ The reason is because you would need two stat crews. We have a limited number of stat crew capacity in the league. You don’t just pull stats crew out of the ether who are capable of doing the stats work at the CFL level. You would have needed two for every CFL game because you’d have to run those systems independently.”
Ambrosie shared the three main parts of the new stats system install: inputting, engine, and interface. He noted that Genius Sports has integrated this same system with other pro leagues “much bigger” than the CFL and they went through “technology challenges” as well.
“We’re going through that experience now. We got a lot of people taking it very seriously,” Ambrosie said. “That top technology expert at Genius has been working on this file directly. They have an entire crew of people working on this project with us directly. It’s not a resource issue. It’s what happens when you do a complete technology overhaul.”
