Right. The only offer than can be made now is a qualifying offer from the FA’s original club to retain them.
But I think there is a time limit between the offer and making a qualifying offer.
As for the timing of the cap announcement? We, the fans are always the last to know. I would bet the teams have known about it since before the start of the “Ed Hervey early tampering window”.
Lalji & Naylor broke it down on the TSN website. Apparently this has caught everyone off guard. It’s a bit of a schmozzle, to say the least. As I mentioned in an earlier post yesterday, Paul Friesen of the Wpg Sun has openly suggested that the Bombers should pay $75K for Lawler & bring him back. It’s not illegal.
Regardless, I’m sure that the GM’s, agents & owners will have a plan in place if teams start circling back to “recover” assets, as already advocated by 1 media person. This doesn’t look good on the league.
Looks like you cherry picked a little there.
"When the window closes on Feb. 9, pending free agents move into an exclusive 48-hour communication window with the teams that hold their present contracts. At that time, every club in the league will be provided with the registered offers the pending free agents have received. Teams have until 10 a.m. ET Feb. 11 to make an offer to their pending free agents, including a copy of it to go to the league office and the CFLPA.
Pending free agents will then have from 10 a.m to noon ET on Feb. 11 to accept any offers that have been made to them by any club."
I am appalled by the teams entering free agency and making offers or making decisions not to sign without knowing about the salary cap increase
I agree that the Bombers should offer Lawler the extra $75,000 or close to it. As he apparently lives in Winnipeg now and has professed a great love for the Bombers, I would expect he would stay if offered. Not a great look but it’s not the fault of Lawler, the Bombers or Hamilton.
Thanks Dibs.
So if you make an offer the player accepts, the only other team that can make an offer after that is the team that holds their present contract.
…and if you are the Loins and you made an offer to an FA, no sleeping in on the 11th because the signing window is 7-9 am…
The window is still open till Sunday @ noon. As far as I know all teams can still talk to any player until then. I expect a lot of conversations regarding keeping the players they got to take place. If a team decides to up the offer, the player still has the final say in that last 2 hrs prior to FA opening Tuesday, Feb 11. The possibility of the current teams doing an about face is something that teams will plan for to cover the bases.
IMO Friesen’s “solution” is a very simple gut reaction to a complicated situation. How happy would all those other guys who re-upped & didn’t go to FA be?? They’re stuck. How happy is that “other” receiver who’s agreed to $175K? Will teams who initially lost out now be brought back into the picture?
I’m fairly confident nothing much changes. Every team is in exactly the same position at the table with the exact same increase in their LOC - if team A now has $75K to match the gap, so does Team B to restore it. It doesn’t benefit any team to start a whole new round of negotiations. I would be very surprised if the Bomber brass want to open that can of worms.
While all fans should be happy for the players and the teams that the 2025 salary cap will increase by close to 10% or $537,365 per team over 2024, there are still many that “critiquent”.
This increase is based on total revenue increase of $19,345,140 and you CANNOT determine the new salary cap- 25% of total revenue or $4,836,285 for the 9 teams, i.e. $537,365 per team - until all teams have submitted their audited revenue. Randie Ambrosie could not provide the information, before the verified numbers were available; personally, I am surprised that the revenue were available that early.
For the players that have agreed to a salary contract with another team, starting Sunday the teams that have "lost "players to another team will have a 48 hours window to speak with their players and then between 10h and 12h Tuesday, February 11,2025, players will decide if they accept what was offered and refuse and re-sign with their team or another team. THE PLAYERS ARE THE ONES MAKING THE FINAL DECISION. ONLY THE PLAYERS CAN CANCEL WHAT WAS AGREED BETWEEN FEBRUArY 2,2025 AND FEBRUARY 9,2025.
No reasons to be critical of the date of the announcement.
Richard
Maybe I’m wrong but can players with offers reject them if they have already agreed? If not then Lawler and others that may feel they left money on the table might put themselves back on the market. I do think that $275,000 for the best receiver in the league is a more than fair amount and am glad that the ridiculous contracts the Elks provided to Lewis and Lawler that skewed salaries are in the past.
I’m not as confident as you that nothing changes across the league, although the current situation is unprecedented so we are all just guessing. With extra cash on hand I am thinking teams will be looking to spend it on the players available now as July will be too late and I don’t think going back to players you may have thought lost is out of the question.
The conditions I would put on that is that I think that the relationship between the player and their current and soon to be former team has to still be good (players who have publicly run down their former team wouldn’t be welcomed back I assume) and secondly that the reason that they weren’t signed until now is money. Lawler still has an excellent relationship with the Bombers and you may have seen his classy departure post. We don’t know whether the only reason he wasn’t kept was money. If that was the case it seems like a no brainer to me to match the offer and bring him back to where he wants to be. If it was up to me I would do that. The Bombers would be offering him house money and it would have no impact on the plans they already had in place before the cap rise was announced.
The “window” should have been postponed a week or so to allow for the Cap adjustment
This is just so CFL of the CFL and maybe Randy’s last FU to the League on his way out
This would have been a good news story if it was 1 or 2 weeks earlier
oh come on now. they can’t do that, these are scheduled way in advance and you can’t just delay it. the info probably wasn’t available till now. stop picking only the cherries you like…
Totally agree that this is so CFL, but I don’t see how Randy had anything to do with it, at least at this time.
The stories I have read say that the numbers were given to the league and player’s association at the end of January, which is actually pretty quick for a Dec 31st year end. The PA then had to decide how to allocate the cap increase among 4 or so different options and ultimately chose to apply it all to the salary cap. They did this in about a week, which is also very fast.
The problem it would appear is a structural one which doesn’t allow enough time before free agency. Maybe it wasn’t noticed as the relatively massive rise in the cap is rare and I’m sure not expected. It is a problem that the accountants should have brought to the league’s attention, accountants of course being the all knowing and all seeing arbiters of how to run a business. Maybe they did and the CFL ignored it. Maybe Randy brought it up and was ignored or maybe he didn’t. I think it is fair to say that part of his job could be said to include noting massive potential f***ups like this and bringing them to the owner’s attention, so depending on what happened in the past on this issue, if anything, he could be rightfully criticzed there, although at it’s core I see this as an accounting issue.
The fix will have to include either changing the year end or delaying free agency as you suggest, or a combination of both. Both present challenges as moving a year end is a pain in the butt and costs money and moving free agency back might be offside with current contracts, although if they can get around that it would be the easiest and quickest and cheapest. That alone would probably not be enough lead time for GM’s to know what they have to spend on their roster and of course many signings are made before the end of the year for contarct allocation reasons as well. A few months lead time would be optimal.
You want me to pick rotton cherries?
If teams knew of the impending rising cap a few days ago the contracts wouldn’t have been handed into the League so early
[quote=“Jon, post:28, topic:96714”]
… have seen his classy departure post. We don’t know whether the only reason he wasn’t kept was money. If that was the case it seems like a no brainer to me to match the offer and bring him back to where he wants to be. If it was up to me I would do that. The Bombers would be offering him house money and it would have no impact on the plans they already had in place before the cap rise was announced.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, TSN’s Lalji & Naylor went through it. See quote from some of the discussion below:
[/quote Q – So what does this mean for players who have negotiated deals this week that are not fully signed and registered with the league?
A- Based on conversations with teams on Wednesday, they are operating under the belief that the players will honour the terms of deals agreed upon this week, which are to be made official when free agency officially opens on February 11th. As one GM said today, “It will test the integrity of everyone.”
So, do I think that the Bombers will be the ones to “test the integrity” as Friesen & yourself are saying they should do? No - I don’t think they go down that road. You’re in essence encouraging a free-for-all. The league’s credibility took a shot already & I would expect owners will discourage a reworking of deals that have been agreed to.
Jon, as far as Lawler goes - he has left for $$$ TWICE. It’s a business. People leave for $$$ reasons all the time.
We should clear up one thing that keeps popping up. Jim Popp in 2019 signed Derel Walker to a $275,000 contract & established a new upper limit. It wasn’t the Elks.
I would think it was a contractual agreement of some sort. According to what @Dibs posted the only team that can make another offer would be, in Lawlers case, Winnipeg.
Just a wild guess but going after other receivers like Jerreth Sterns who they just signed would indicate they may have moved on.
If you read Dibs post a couple above yours, says to me the only team who can make a counter offer would be the team who held his contract before he became a free agent.
“When the window closes on Feb. 9, pending free agents move into an exclusive 48-hour communication window with the teams that hold their present contracts.”
Our dollar has lost so much parity that this basically just evens things out for American players.
The way I read it is that the agreement is binding on the team offering during the Hervey window. Players appear to have the right to accept competing offers from their current team for 48 hours at the end of the window, other teams can make offers in the two hour window after that.
Aah. That makes sense. IOW, it’s opened up again in that 10 AM - noon period for other teams to step up so the current team can’t just look at the offers & match w/o the other teams re-jigging their offers if necessary.
That sounds right.
If a player rejects what he agreed to with another team, he becomes a free agent and can accept an offer from his team or any other team.
Richard
I don’t see it the same way. Yes Lawler left for $$$ twice, but if $$$ were the only problem this time, and I don’t know that it is, why not bring him back? The Bombers didn’t screw up and didn’t know they had house money they could use to pay him. If they want him and they pay enough they deserve him and would be robbed otherwise. Again, I don’t know whether there are other reasons besides money or whether they consider $275,000 too expensive even for Kenny. We’ll see. This isn’t the Bombers fault or their problem if they bring him back, which I point out they could have tried to do anyway even without the salary cap increase. So you are agreeing that the Bombers now can’t match the offer for Lawler because the league screwed up?
Lalji and Naylor are simply wrong and misguided in their opinions. They are football experts and not legal experts. The Bombers aren’t encouraging a free-for-all. Ridiculous. They would only be matching an offer that they are entitled to match with the money available under the salary cap. It is not the respomsibilty of the Bombers organization to weaken their team so the league can save face on their screwup (which everyone knows is their screw up already) and that goes for any other team that is in the same position. Rather than sacrificing a chance to win because the league screwed up the salary cap, they are perfectly entitled to pay Lawler more with the money they now know is available which they didn’t know was available when they let him walk (Again-if that is their reasoning behind not signing him).
And there’s not going to be a meeting or a vote by the owners, nor could they legally decide to bar the Bombers from using their available money within the rules without being successfully challenged and further then all other teams wouldn’t be able to use their money either. Preposterous. I don’t think the TSN boys have thought this through very well and the GM who said that this will “test the integrity of everyone” might just have been wearing whiskers and a cat’s tail.
As for the horrible Derel Walker contract, I wasn’t referring to that but more recently to the Elks signing Geno Lewis and Kenny Lawler for $320,000 and $300,000 respectively. The top end has now come down to $275,000 assuming Lawler doesn’t reject everything and try to obtain more.
Because apart from them 99% of the team was rookies on entry level contracts.
So what the Elks paid premium players was more than they were worth. I wouldn’t look at any contract they paid big money to as any more than that.