Don’t expect changes to CFL’s version of free agency

TSN Football Insider

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As the dust settles from the Canadian Football League’s frantic free-agency period and the accompanying excitement, it’s time to ask whether this much player movement is a good thing for the league.

Free agency, in general, has been good for driving interest in sports and maintaining competitive balance, as every league needs its share of roster movement. And players certainly deserve a means to access market value for their services.

The debate is whether it’s healthy for the CFL when as many as three quarters of the players on some teams come up for renewal after every season.

The process exhausts general managers, whose off-season jobs have gone from carefully shaping their roster and wading into the market for a player or two, to full-scale negotiations with most of the players on their own team and dozens of free agents in a process that spans from the end of Grey Cup right into mid-February.

Without a doubt, there are some benefits to the current system.

Liberal free agency provides a measure of competitive balance. It’s hard for good teams to stay on top and bad teams can rebuild overnight – as Ottawa is attempting to do right now and Toronto successfully did before the 2021 season.

Those players who can double or even triple their salaries off one big season, such as receiver Kenny Lawler moving from Winnipeg to Edmonton for $300,000 this week, enjoy the benefits of such market freedom. But the majority say they would prefer a system where players and teams had more of a commitment to one another, and that they didn’t have to live such a year-to-year existence.

While many fans dine out on the rich free agent off-season rumour mill and the subsequent flurry of transactions