When the Canadian Football League issued a media release on Wednesday that the Edmonton Eskimos had been fined $10,000 for tampering in the signing of free agent Odell Willis, one thing immediately came to mind: Why didn’t the team just take a little longer to make the announcement official?
When the Eskimos heralded the signing of the free agent rush end from Saskatchewan a mere four minutes after free agency began on Feb. 16, even by CFL standards it set a record for expediency. You might say the Eskimos were in a real rush to announce they’d signed the much-publicized rush end.
Look, it’s fairly common knowledge teams engage in conversations with prospective free-agent players, either directly or indirectly, to get a jump on the opportunity. A player can talk to his agent and explain what he wants in terms of dollars and/or specific needs with a team (or teams) with which he might want to play. The agent can then converse with the party (or parties) interested in making an offer. It doesn’t even have to be direct and to the point. Perhaps it could be as simple as prefacing the talk with a “what if” to create the notion of supposition should tampering ever come into play.
Or maybe it is a little more direct, but nobody spills the beans and no one is the wiser.
Moments after the deals are done, particularly in this age of social media, word gets out anyway. But until the contract is registered with the CFL head office, nothing is official, and if there is no comment from the team, it is merely a rumour (albeit with a well-placed source or sources). As the late Greg Mohns used to say, “Until the contract is registered with the league it is not official and there is nothing to say.”
So if a team wants to quickly announce the signing — as the Eskimos clearly did to herald the move — it needs to wait until the contract is registered to make sure there isn’t a misstep.
As noted in a story in the Edmonton Sun on Thursday, Eskimos’ rookie general manager Ed Hervey told the media in advance of the start of free agency: “The early bird gets the worm, but the early bird also gets fined by the league. I don’t want to be fined by the league. I’m going to follow the rules and protocols of the league.”
Well, that’s exactly what happened.
The Eskimos have gone through some interesting times in recent months. First-year president Len Rhodes fired GM Eric Tillman heading into last year’s playoffs in which the team was set to play the Toronto Argonauts, but didn’t really offer a plausible explanation. Following the end of the season, Rhodes named Hervey, the team’s head scout, as the new GM. Hervey began the process of dissembling the team that Tillman had created since joining the Eskimos in September 2010. Hervey has done some good things to position the team in a positive way going forward, although the true indication will come when the team plays. Until then, all the moves are merely fodder for discussion.
In the matter of the move that cost the Eskimos $10,000, this falls into the category of what the late Casey Stengel referred to as “error of enthusiasm.” Had the Eskimos waited an hour or two or maybe even a full day, no one would have been the wiser they had engaged in a clear violation of the rules.
So, Hervey and the Eskimos organization, which had already gone through enough negative public scrutiny last season, opened itself up for criticism. Saskatchewan Roughriders GM Brendan Taman told the Sun he did not launch a complaint with the CFL head office, but he didn’t have to because it was obvious the Eskimos jumped off side on this and needed to be flagged.
That it took three weeks for the CFL to announce the penalty for the transgression is another matter. We’ll give the CFL the benefit of wanting to wait until the right moment to publicize the news. The CFL had more pressing matters such as its annual congress to exchange ideas between the clubs and the head office and to announce the Coach of the Year. Additionally, the CFL was working out the final kinks in the 2013 schedule, which had yet to be released. Announcing the Eskimos had been whacked ahead of those meaty pieces of CFL business would have overshadowed the good news. The adage that no news is good news even if it’s bad news isn’t all together true.
The Coach of the Year announcement and the release of the schedule herald the arrival of a new season only a few months away. These are the things the CFL wants to publicize, not that it has fined a team for blatantly disobeying the rules.
Some people have emailed or tweeted me wondering if the money is a sufficient penalty, thinking that perhaps taking away a draft pick would send out a more meaningful message. Losing a draft pick would really hurt because in the following year’s draft the penalty would be revisited and it would be a reminder of the transgression/blunder. It’s like getting nailed for speeding and docked demerit points. In this case, the Eskimos got nailed for going a little too fast and not obeying the rules.
According to a spokesperson for the CFL, the maximum fine that can be levied against a team is $25,000, but a draft pick cannot be taken away.
If what the Eskimos did had been truly heinous, the fine would have been greater. Consider it a mistake by an aggressive rookie GM that aggressively moved forward, but made a mistake along the way.