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Riders using "as many as 95 players," validating Bo Levi Mitchell's criticisms

andrew bucholtz
Riders using "as many as 95 players," validating Bo Levi Mitchell's criticisms

The Chris Jones era in Saskatchewan has seen the Roughriders start 1-5 and also create some controversy with their handling of their roster. The team was fined $15,000 by the CFL last week for violating the ratio rule by not playing enough Canadians against B.C., and they've come under Twitter fire this week from Calgary Stampeders' quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell (who they lost to last week and will face again Saturday) for having a bunch of non-rostered players in Regina:

It appears that Mitchell is quite correct about the Riders keeping extra players around, but that isn't necessarily illegal under the letter of the CBA: teams are allowed to work out unsigned players, use the injury lists to stash players and so on. The problem only comes if unsigned players participate in teams' regular practices, and that doesn't seem to be happening. Still, the scope of what Saskatchewan is doing appears unprecedented, and that may provoke some change in those rules. As Darrell Davis writes at 3 Down Nation, the Riders have a whole ton of unsigned guys they're regularly "utilizing" in addition to their vast "injury" list:

According to a Roughriders source, the team regularly has up to 95 players in its stable. That’s more than two full game-day rosters.

A recent practice featured 65 players on the field, while another group of 15 or so watched the workout, then began stretching during the final minutes before walking onto the stadium’s turf to run less-formalized drills under the watch of nearby coaches.

For its most recent game — a 35-15 loss in Calgary on Thursday — Saskatchewan had 46 players on its roster, with an additional 18 listed on the six-game injury list, one more on the one-game injury list and 10 on its practice roster.

All CFL teams use injury lists to stash players and, like other teams, there’s no way all 18 players on Saskatchewan’s six-game list are injured. According to their lists, the Riders are doing nothing wrong. But as Mitchell noted in his cryptic message, when the Riders signed a bevy of players the other day, they didn’t have to fly the signees into Regina because they were likely already there, among the anonymous bodies working out following scheduled practices and during the team’s unofficial, off-day practices.

There are always regulatory loopholes. The CFL allows players to not appear on roster lists while they’re “in transit,’’ teams can “test” un-signed players and they can occasionally put their injured players into practices to assess their recovery status.

But let’s face it, the Roughriders are indeed stretching those rules beyond the intended means.

That's really the issue here, and that's why the CFL is looking into this. The CBA states in Article 17.02 that  "A player who is not signed to a CFL Standard Player Contract or a Practice Agreement shall be prohibited from attending a practice of a Member Club," and that article also talks about players who practice with the club being required to sign practice roster agreements. It's unclear if the Riders having these unsigned players at practice (but not on the field until after practice ends) and meeting with coaches violates the rules. It's also unclear if there's anything to prohibit a team from paying players not on its roster (and the Roughriders are presumably compensating these guys in some way; it seems unlikely many would hang around for long without that) or from repeatedly "trying out" the same players. Scott Mitchell notes that some of them are being paid:

The Riders may be fine under the letter of the rules, as Jones claimed Wednesday, or they may not be. If there's no CFL rule that prohibits this, it would seem to be a smart usage of their resources; they're the league's wealthiest team, and while they're restricted in what they can spend on rostered players by the salary cap, they might as well use some of that money for other uncapped expenses, such as their expanded coaching and scouting staffs, their injured list, and potentially these unrostered players. Whether keeping so many players around is a good use of money or not (it certainly hasn't given them a competitive advantage so far) is debatable, but hey, why not spend money on something that could improve the on-field product instead of just accumulating wealth?

From the wider CFL perspective, though, this feels like something that the league should explicitly address one way or another. If the CFL office wants a league where teams can keep around almost an extra roster of players with many of them not on official contracts, fine, but make it very clear that all teams can do that and make it very clear what those players can and can't do. If the league doesn't want that, then come up with some explicit limitations on tryouts and if teams can compensate players not on their roster. Either way, this is something worth talking about, and something where all clubs should be on the same page. Good for Mitchell for bringing it to light. It's sort of funny that a quarterback in a different city brought up this story rather than one of the many journalists who cover the Riders day-in, day-out, but maybe that's just more proof of Mitchell's versatility. If this whole quarterbacking thing doesn't work out, he might have a nice career as a CFL writer ahead.