Broken CBA Will Lead to Headaches for CFL

Editor's Note: The following was originally posted as a column for Nitsky's Notes on The Projector's website. The original can be found at http://theprojector.ca/stories/view/nitskys-notes3

Labour issues have found themselves in the sports pages with increasing frequency over the past several years. From football to hockey and basketball, it feels as though owners of one league or another are always squabbling with their players. Terms like revenue sharing, salary floor and collective bargaining agreement (CBA) have become just as common as hat trick, shutout or winning streak in every fan’s vocabulary.

The NHL, NFL, and NBA all agreed to new collective bargaining agreements with their respective players’ unions since 2011, ending or avoiding lockouts. While in some cases, deals led to rollbacks of salaries or higher television revenues, in all three major leagues deals led to increased salaries for many players.

In March of 2013, the CFL signed a $40 million per year television contract with TSN through 2018. The deal is more than twice as much as the previous television contract, which paid the league $15 million per year.

With an expiring CBA, the CFL Players’ Association (CFLPA), which has been notoriously inept in the past, saw dollar signs. They promised their players the world. Revenue sharing. A salary floor. More guaranteed money.

Dollar signs are understandable. Professional athletes have a very small window where they can earn a living. Especially in a league like the CFL, where rookies and role players are making as little as $50,000 a year, anything the players’ association can do to help them maximize their earning potential is needed.

The CFLPA eventually ended up caving in negotiations. Revenue sharing, the hill they had promised to die on, never came close to happening. But there’s one issue the CFLPA also conceded that’s being overlooked, one that could prove disastrous in the future. This issue deals with player safety and head injuries.

Sports fans have been beaten over the head with concussion talk for the last several years. Brain trauma, the quiet room and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are as common as revenue sharing, salary floor and collective bargaining on the sports pages.

The CFLPA had a chance to make a stand for the health of their players with this CBA. The players had asked for independent neurologists — without any allegiance to the team, which, in theory, means they would have no motivation for sending potentially injured players back onto the field. The CFL, inexplicably, refused to bend to this basic request to improve player safety.

When Donald Washington was laying in a crumpled heap on Investors Group Field during the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ preseason opener on June 9, days before the players would vote to ratify a CBA that refused to protect them, I couldn’t help but wonder what the league was thinking.

No revenue sharing, no salary floor, those things all make sense. The CFL and its teams have a hard enough time making money. Business margins are tight, and I don’t blame them for squeezing out every penny they possibly can.

But risking the health of your workforce and your most valuable assets isn’t just bad politics, it’s bad business. As research on CTE and concussions continues to progress, both the CFL and its players union are bound to find they’ve come up with a broken business model.

Unfortunately, that realization might just come at the cost of too many broken players.