LAST Friday, seemingly every CFL player who has an e-mail address received correspondence from the players association reporting that the new cap figure for the 2008 season would be $4.2 million, an increase of only $150,000 from the 2007 cap of $4.05 million as agreed upon by the CFL's board of governors.
That is little more than a speed bump when it comes to salary expenditures. Hell, it's about as noticeable as a centimetre of snow in Winnipeg in January.
You may argue that 150 grand in the CFL is the salary equivalent of one competent new player, but when you consider that for the most part, almost every rostered player from 2007 is scheduled to make more in 2008, that money was already spent by athletes simply having their option years ratified by their clubs for '08.
The next variable in this equation are those players who had significant portions (over two-thirds in my case) of their salaries masked in the cap loophole of last November. I like to think of that period as the black hole of 2007 where no cash, and no one, was able to escape its alluring grasp.
Since many teams reworked the salaries of upwards of 10 players on their rosters to get under the cap for 2007 by utilizing this loophole, you can be assured that in most cases, the accelerated figures for 2008 of only one or two of these 10 or so players on each team will easily exceed the cap increase of $150,000 by themselves.
Next in line for another piece of this same 150K which -- to this point in my column -- has already been spent six times over, are those free agents that are looking for more than the standard five per cent raise that usually materializes from one contract year to the next.
I would dare say, using the Winnipeg Football Club for example, that if you added up the increases in pay our top three free agents are looking for (Dan Goodspeed, Tom Canada, and Matt Sheridan), you would already equate close to half of that 150K with just three players out of a free agent total that hovers around 10 players.
If we add to the list, those players who are still under contract but still looking for a bump in pay, it gets awfully depressing awfully fast. Luckily for the league, the number of total players that will make it to free agency this year will be very low, so bidding wars for the services of the few who do shouldn't require a significant percentage of a team's expenditures.
Small raises
Lastly, we can't forget, with most players graduating to small raises, many players having huge portions of their contracts accelerated, and the wishes of free agents on the docket -- it also thereby costs more when any of these players are in the infirmary when the inevitable percentage of every team gets nicked up every year.
Of course I would be remiss if I didn't mention all of the factors that will inevitably counter some of these snowballing expenses. Players that have left the CFL for the NFL are automatically wiped from the books -- until most of them come back for a pro-rated portion in September -- but for now they are gone.
Players that retire are a savings boon because most of them are older and somewhat more expensive, which can register in discounts when exchanged for younger, cheaper talent.
There will also be savings brought about by players being asked in a non-negotiable manner to take a pay cut, but the biggest space saver will, of course, come via the unwilling sacrifices of those players that are simply released outright.
While I am not on the board of governors or privy to the financial statements of any of the football clubs in the CFL, 150K as the agreed upon increase for 2008, in my opinion, doesn't even meet or cover the cost of standard salary inflation from '07 to '08, so it is actually more of an impediment than a windfall.
The only thing that will make a big enough dent to offset this decision is player attrition, and something tells me that the balance sheet has yet to be reworked with a slew of cap casualties to come once again in 2008, just as there were in 2007.
Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.
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