Competitive teams get built through CFL’s free-agent frenzy

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Riders GM Jeremy O’Day: ‘You want guys to feel comfortable and be building towards something, which is a championship.’

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How do you build a competitive team in the CFL?

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Simple answer: Draft good Canadian players and sign good Americans. The hardest part is keeping them together, which will be emphasized again during the first two weeks of February in a stretch that truly should be called “Free-agent frenzy.”

“It’s difficult with the salary cap,” said Saskatchewan Roughriders general manager Jeremy O’Day. “In the best case you’d love to have a situation where you were just building through your drafting and scouting, but it doesn’t always happen that way.”

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After partaking heavily in last year’s free-agent market, the Roughriders don’t expect to add a huge bunch of newcomers after their contracts expire Feb. 11.

“We don’t want to be in a situation where we’re super heavy in free agency,” said O’Day, who has re-signed 12 of 32 Roughriders whose contracts were due to expire. “You want to have some continuity. You want guys to feel comfortable and be building towards something, which is a championship.”

The Roughriders last won a Grey Cup in 2013, when O’Day was an assistant general manager. He also won twice as a player, with Saskatchewan in 2007 and the Toronto Argonauts in 1997, so he knows the process and is aware that some veterans like defensive lineman Micah Johnson like to see what’s being offered elsewhere before deciding if he will rejoin the Roughriders.

En route to last year’s Grey Cup victory, the Argonauts lured eight free agents away from other teams. Most made minimal contributions — or none at all — but  running back Ka’Deem Carey from the Calgary Stampeders was a 1,000-yard rusher who played a major role in the Argonauts’ success.

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Toronto also re-signed 16 of its 31 potential free agents, but needed a running back in 2024 because A.J. Ouellette became a free agent and joined the Roughriders. Ouellette’s season was plagued by injuries, but he signed a multi-year contract that he evidently re-negotiated to spend at least one more season in Saskatchewan.

CFL free agency is basically a marketplace which started getting exceptionally busy in 2016, when the league first allowed players to sign one-year contracts.

All players previously had to sign contracts with a league-mandated, one-year option attached. Only Canadian CFL rookies now have a mandatory option year on their initial contracts

If the team retains a player, the option year has always included a modest salary increase of 5-10 per cent. Player agents obviously despise option years, but the rule did help with one thing — keeping a team together through multi-year contracts.

“Contracts don’t always time out at the right time,” said O’Day. “(If) you have a good player in that position who makes a good contract and another player coming up who also needs a good contract, you’re not able to provide two guys in the same position with the starting money that they would be asking for.

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“So I think you’re always going to have to do something in free agency.”

Every American player joining a CFL team is initially a free agent, typically coming to a franchise that owned his rights by placing him on its negotiation list. Some Canadian and Global players begin their CFL careers as free agents, but most get selected in drafts that pre-determine their destinations.

Mixing salaries that range from a rookie’s $70,000 to a veteran quarterback’s $500,000 can be a challenge under a team’s annual salary cap of $5.6 million. That’s why teams let some players leave as free agents while looking at another team’s available free agents, some of whom want hefty salary increases.

The Roughriders have three classes of pending free agents, according to O’Day: Players who have received solid offers because they really want to re-sign them, players they have talked to about rejoining the squad if their salaries can fit under the cap and players who haven’t been offered contracts because — at the moment — they don’t fit into the team’s plans.

On Feb. 2 every team can begin making offers to free agents from other teams. That window closes Feb. 9.

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“There’s so many players we talk to during the window that never become Roughriders,” said O’Day. “We do have lots of conversations during that window, doing our due diligence, trying to find out the lay of the land. And sometimes you can figure out what other teams are doing.”

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