Upstart leagues cause no great panic for CFL

Dave Naylor

TSN Football Insider

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Out of the dead of winter comes noise from the latest wave of alternative professional football on this continent, the reborn versions of the USFL and XFL.

While neither has played a down, both have been very busy of late.

The USFL completed its initial two-day draft this week, with eight teams selecting 276 players for an upcoming 10-game season that begins on April 16.

This USFL has no relation the old USFL of the 1980s and is playing its entire regular season schedule out of a hub in Birmingham, Ala., and its playoffs in another hub in Canton, Ohio. It has Fox Sports as an equity partner and host broadcaster.

And this USFL isn’t competing with the National Football League for players like the old one did. Instead, it’s shopping the bargain aisle for players, paying $45,000 (U.S.) plus victory bonuses. Several players released by CFL teams, including quarterbacks Shea Patterson and Paxton Lynch, were involved in this week’s draft.

Meanwhile, the latest version of the XFL had some news to share this week as well, entering into an agreement with the NFL that will see it act as a kind of football laboratory to test out innovations to the game and equipment. The two leagues will also collaborate on other ways to grow the sport.

Of course, it was about a year ago that the Canadian Football League announced it was collaborating with the XFL on ways to grow the game, an arrangement that led to the study of forming a new league before parting ways without agreement.

The XFL and the NFL will remain separate, but their agreement certainly signals a spirit of closeness and co-operation that could open doors to further co-ventures once the XFL re-launches in the spring of 2023.

There are people who will rightly wonder why all this alternative football activity is happening yet again, given the graveyard that includes the original USFL, two versions of the XFL, the WLAF (later NFL Europe), the AAF and the UFL.

It’s driven by four simple factors:

1. Football is the most popular sport in America – and it’s not close.

2. There are markets all over the U.S. that are not home to, nor close to, professional football teams.

3. There is a plentiful supply of talented players wiling to play for cheap.

4. Television loves football.

That combination of factors continues to prove irresistible, if not sustainable.

No upstart league has any illusion of competing with the NFL these days. They are simply trying to attract a sliver of the revenues and attention the NFL commands and find sustainability on a vastly different economy of scale.

But no one has been able to find the balance to make that work.

That’s why there is no great panic north of the border about what these new leagues might mean for the CFL, despite the fact there were 55 players from CFL negotiation lists drafted by USFL teams, representing about 14 per cent of players teams had protected – including 10 alone from Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

And it has changed the dynamics for teams in player recruitment this off-season, as many players now have a choice.

The CFL gets away with paying its rookie players very low salaries of between $65,000 and $80,000 (Canadian) for a 21-week season. The XFL is already close to competing with those salaries when factoring in currency conversion.

Besides competitive rookie salaries, these new leagues will provide an opportunity to play a shorter season that wraps up in time for players to go straight into NFL training camps, if an opportunity awaits.

That’s why many players fresh out of college or recently cut from the NFL will turn to the USFL or XFL first, including perhaps some Canadians.

Offensive lineman Liam Dobson, Winnipeg’s first-round choice in last spring’s draft, was selected in the USFL Draft on Wednesday, meaning he likely won’t be anywhere near Winnipeg until at least 2024.

If even two or three Canadian prospects get diverted to the USFL or XFL per season, it’s going to have an effect on the CFL talent pool.

As for Americans, it’s indeed true that there is an enormous amount of talent just below the surface skimmed off by the NFL. But it’s also foolish to suggest that losing players to other leagues over time isn’t going to affect the CFL product.

Even if these new leagues manage to delay players coming north by two or three years, it’s going to make a difference in areas like the development of quarterbacks, which is already a two-to-three-year process in the CFL.

The impact of competition at present is minimized by the fact many players prefer the stability of the CFL over the uncertainty of a start-up league. Right now, that’s the biggest advantage CFL teams have, and it’s a big one.

The XFL may present a bigger challenge in that regard because its relationship with the NFL provides credibility, if nothing else, but that’s still a year away.

The CFL has been well-served in the past by simply focussing on its own business and ignoring the noise made by new leagues south of the border. There’s no point reacting to something that has never proven sustainable.

It should also be noted that the CFL’s talent pool was never crippled during the years that any defunct leagues were playing. But the challenges to the CFL’s player recruitment would become more significant if any of these leagues were ever to become sustainable.

That’s the difference between a true threat and a temporary annoyance.