There are teams that are not able to fire their coaches, even if they are not winning and their players are giving up on them. This has happened for a couple of seasons now. This does not help any other team in the CFL and makes it harder to market the CFL. I think that the coaches should be under the same sort of contracts as the players. If you do not perform to the expected level, sorry but you are “released” with no further compensation.
That would likely be a huge obstacle to attracting coaches … don’t know if any other football coaches are subject to “toilet paper” contracts.
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Yeah, we’re likely stuck with guaranteed contracts for coaches.
And I don’t think the coaches/operations cap should be scrapped altogether.
Having no cap makes it too easy for irresponsible owners to drop loads of money on coaches and then walk away from the franchise when their losses get too high. This not only drives up the cost of coaches for all the franchises, but it also leaves the other franchises scrambling to either pay the bills left by the irresponsible owners or find a new owner to do it for them. The league needs to maintain a degree of cost certainty to create stability.
Having said that, I think the operations cap could be tweaked so that fired coaches don’t count (or count much less) toward the cap.
Also, teams can simply exceed the cap and pay the fine. It’d probably be worth it for Edmonton.
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it’s not just a coaches thing, there are many things wrong at the moment. the general quality of football has been awful. i’m not kidding when i say that the XFL was better through the first 4 weeks of their season. my biggest complaint was mediocre quarterbacks but so far, four of the CFL teams have had much worse.
the stats fiasco, streaming issues, lack of post game VOD, expansions pop up stadiums hot air … 
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it isn’t good for the the health of the league if only a few teams are decent. last nights game between Elks and REDBLACKS was hard to watch on so many levels. i love football at all levels and rarely want my time back, but after that game was one of those times.
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A soft-cap for operations in which teams pay a dollar-for-dollar penalty for the first year a fired Ops-person’s puts them over the Ops-cap, $2-for-$1 in the second year, $3-for-$1 in the third year, etc. … make it hurt more if the team “cuts bait” early in the contract … fines distributed in equal shares to any teams that did not exceed the operations cap that year.
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Another option previously discussed on this forum is to only penalize the teams during the year in which they are fired, or some other limited time or percentage of the contract remaining.
It’s also a delicate balance. Saskatchewan and Winnipeg, for example, through equalization can’t be paying for more coaches in Toronto than they have if that were to take place. So even scrapping the cap would need rules that ensure that the weaker teams financially don’t benefit financially from hiring more coaches.
Don’t know if you read about Jones reportedly signing 4 one year contracts in Edmonton in an apparent effort at least in part to avoid coaches cap penalties beyond the current season if he were to be let go. I don’t know if that would work but it shouldn’t be allowed as all teams should be on a level playing field if there is a cap in place.
I’m just throwing things out there and don’t have the answers but I think we can all agree that not being able to hire enough coaches if some are fired hurts individual teams and the league overall. It would also appear fairly obvious that the coaches cap as currently constituted isn’t working very well and often is hurting. At the very least amendments need to be made. I don’t understand the reluctance to address this. It hasn’t been in place that long and as with anything new it is naive and probably stupid to think that everything new will be perfect and never need a massage or two at the very least.
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I like this concept, but might make it a bit less harsh. Maybe .50 (or even 0) the first year, then $1 the second and $2 the third?
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I’d be more concerned about the lack of July 3rd/4th games on the schedule as far as marketing is concerned. I always see posts about how to increase fan interest (internationally too) and the opportunity got blown to show a full four-game slate of games on those two days for the Americans who are at home for the holiday.
Makes no sense to me. You have fans south of the border that are more than willing to watch when you consider the Indy 500 is over, and there’s only baseball left between now and September.
As far as the cap is concerned, you can always pay players and coaches under the table and get away with it. It’s like price controls and economics 101 – it doesn’t work and there’s loopholes to pay coaches (and players) with other non-cash rewards
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I have written elswhere that if operations caps are eliminated then profit-sharing has to go also. If teams want to spend more than they can afford they can’t expect to overspend with some other teams’ money.
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That’s definitely got to be part of the conversation. You can’t have teams spending wrecklessly and then collecting revenue from the other clubs. I think the idea, though, is to create competitive balance and cost certainty.
Penalizing teams for firing struggling coaches works against creating competitive balance.
I wonder if they created a operations floor along with the cap. I think it’d help if there such a floor (as well as one for marketing/social media).
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You’re not wrong about an operations floor. I mentioned elsewhere that Calvin Griffith, the original owner of the Minnesota Twins, suffered greatly from bad public relations because his only asset was the team. He had no other wealth or income to subsidize the team. That is why he had to sell and turn it over someone with greater assets. The same thing would happen to any sports enterprise that can’t compete financially. This brings us to the issue of EVERY team being able to support itself. I don’t have any better answers to that than anyone else, and mine would probably be much worse than most.
Profit-sharing should only be a stopgap until every team figures out how to make profitability happen.
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we have a game on the 3rd and we dont play games on tuesdays.
Cant imagine people in USA staying home on July 4th to watch Canadian Football.
and none of this has anything to do with the coaches cap
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You would think they would’ve used this long weekend to schedule a double header on Saturday.
The big event every Canada Day is the Blue Jays at home dressed in red and playing to a sold out crowd of 48k.
The CFL decides to have three teams on a bye
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Yes,especially when said teams have rich owners.
Well, just look who’s in charge of the league, that should answer all your thoughts.
Players are
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[quote=“GHT120, post:2, topic:86757”]
That would likely be a huge obstacle to attracting coaches … don’t know if any other football coaches are subject to “toilet paper” contracts.
On reflection, they should perhaps still be paid, however the only money that should count against the cap is the actual money spent on personal who were actually on the field and coaching. Fire a coach and his salary becomes available under the cap to pay the replacement.
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I think there’d have to be some formula to exclude teams who hire and fire coaches willy nilly from receiving revenue sharing. It could be as simple as excluding those fired coaches’s salaries from the “expenses” column when calculating which teams contribute to revenue sharing and which teams receive revenue sharing.
If there were a CFL game on the 4th I would watch it, but I’m already hooked. How often has anyone seen a July 1st sporting event in the US where Canada Day was even mentioned?