Does the CFL have sports’ best playoff bonuses?

There's more to the CFL playoffs than just the thrill of the game, as there are financial rewards on the line for the players involved. Those rewards aren't insignificant, either. If you're a player on a team that finishes first in your division, you get $3,300 for that, plus an automatic $3,500 for playing in a division final. Competitors on teams involved in each divisional semi-final also get $3,300 for that, and $3,500 if they win and go on to the division final. If your team wins the divisional final and advances to the Grey Cup, you get $16,000 if your team wins that game and $8,000 if you lose. Those aren't bad chunks of change.

Those bonuses do pale besides most other sports' playoff bonuses, but not by quite as much as you'd think given the vastly different financial pictures across leagues. In the NFL, wild-card playoff teams get $21,000 (all figures in this paragraph are in American dollars) per player on a division-winning team and $19,000 per player on the team that didn't win the division. Divisional-round playoff teams get $21,000 per player, while conference championship participants get $38,000 per player. The Super Bowl champions get $83,000 each and the losers get $42,000 each. That may sound like significantly more, but consider that the average (or mean) NFL salary is around $1.9 million, with the average CFL salary being $93,475 (or 23.75 times as much). If you prefer median salaries (or what the average, middle-of-the-road player is actually making, not total dollars/total players), the CFL one is probably around $60,000 or slightly smaller and the NFL one is $770,000, or 12.83 times as much.

On the playoff bonus front, a player on a Grey Cup-winning team (like the 2010 Montreal Alouettes, pictured above at their celebratory parade last December) hauls in a total of an extra $22,800, 38 per cent of the league's median salary. A player on a Super Bowl winning team makes a maximum of $163,000 (if they're on a division-winning team that plays in a wild-card game), just 7.15 times as much as the maximum CFL playoff bonus and just 21 per cent of the league's median salary. Thus, NFL players get more total money, but the CFL's playoff money is significantly larger proportionally (despite having less playoff rounds).

What about other sports? In the NHL, teams that win the Stanley Cup get get $1,000,000 to split amongst the players; with a 23-man roster, that's a $43,478 per player maximum, just 1.9 times the CFL bonus (and that's for playoffs that have up to 28 games and take three months, while the CFL playoffs have a maximum of three games and take less than a month). The NHL's median salary seems to be about $1.3 million, so their maximum playoff bonus is just 3.3 per cent of the league's median salary. In baseball, individual players have apparently collected about $362,000 before; the league's median salary looks to be about $2 million, so this is about 18 per cent of that (and that's also for a long postseason). NBA champions get about $3 million per team, which would be $250,000 per player (if split evenly across a 12-man roster); the median salary seems to be about $2.2 million, so this would be 11.4 per cent of that (and that's also for a long season).

Thus, the CFL has by far the highest playoff bonus as a portion of median salary. When you throw in that the league also plays the fewest playoff games of any of these leagues and that their regular salaries (and finances in general) are by far the lowest of any league here, those playoff bonuses look even more attractive and appealing. Players have a lot to play for besides the money, of course, including pride, their teammates and the Grey Cup. It doesn't hurt that there's so much extra money on the line, though.