Photo: Neil Noonan/3DownNation. All rights reserved.
CFL fans are looking forward to more summer fun in 2027, but an earlier start to the season won’t mean cold beer in the sun for the league’s football operations departments — even if they could use a few.
With Victoria Day long weekend pencilled in as the league’s official start date going forward, every other component of the offseason has to be bumped up to match. This means next year’s CFL Canadian Draft will take place on April 13, well before its NFL counterpart, adding more guesswork to a process that already involves a fair bit of prognostication.
“It’ll make it extremely more difficult,” Winnipeg Blue Bombers general manager Kyle Walters recently told reporters. “I said to the guys (on draft night), ‘Imagine next year, when we’re doing this two weeks before the (NFL) Draft.’”
“It’s extremely challenging and in two parts, because you’ll see maybe some players that were on the verge, that you’re not sure they were going to get (NFL) undrafted grades. You saw Malick Meiga and Kevin Cline were kind of in that boat, ‘We’re not really sure (if they’ll get signed in the NFL).’ A year from now, they would have gotten drafted (in the CFL) a lot earlier, and then it would have been, ‘Oh, crap.’
“Then the other end is maybe guys that you thought were going to get big deals that maybe didn’t, and so you didn’t draft them early enough. That’s another, ‘Oh crap.’ That just makes it far more challenging a year from now.”
Meiga and Cline both signed surprise undrafted free agent contracts following the NFL Draft, which affected their stock north of the border. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats still took Meiga with the 14th overall pick, believing his opportunity with the Carolina Panthers to be more tenuous, while Winnipeg bet on Cline with the 20th overall selection despite him having a contract with the Miami Dolphins.
In future years, CFL teams won’t have nearly as clear a picture as to how long they’ll have to wait for those potentially impactful players.
“You’d better have very, very good contacts in the NFL,” B.C. Lions general manager Ryan Rigmaiden echoed. “Your scouting staff had better have good information, because it’s going to be more important than ever.”
The added challenges for CFL front offices won’t stop on draft day. Under the new tentative schedule, rookies will be expected to report to CFL teams on April 21, with veterans beginning training camp on April 24. The NFL Draft process still won’t be resolved at that point, and any prospect with the slightest hint of interest won’t be available until the conclusion of NFL rookie mini-camps.
This season, that date is set for May 10, but it could be even later next year. Five of the top 12 picks in this year’s CFL Draft class are already going to be late to report for that reason, but the ripple effects in the future could be even more substantial.
“How you develop a player is going to change everything. Let’s say Nate DeMontagnac had an NFL mini-camp. OK, well, that’s fantastic, and I’m never going to tell a player to not take that opportunity, but that means by the time we get him, training camp may be over,” Rigmaiden explained, referencing B.C.’s first-round selection.
“How do you keep him active on your roster if he hasn’t even taken a snap in camp? That’s where it becomes a little bit challenging.”
Even for players who won’t get a passing glance from NFL teams, there will be external factors limiting training camp participation. At many universities, final exams are not completed until the end of the month of April. Given that CFL money isn’t life-changing, draft picks will mostly want to wrap up their academic requirements before beginning their professional careers. This means rookie camps may be scarce on rookies under the new model.
Everyone else could also be seriously affected by this dynamic, as most CFL teams host their training camps on university campuses to take advantage of cheap and plentiful accommodations in empty residences. Those dorms will now be filled with students cramming for exams.
“We’re at Thompson Rivers University and (under the new CFL schedule), they’re still going to be in school. There’s a ton of stuff that we’ve got to figure out,” Rigmaiden said. “The good news is we’ve got a really good president, and Neil (McEvoy) and these guys are terrific at what they do. We’ll figure it out. But are there challenges moving forward? For sure.”
In an interview with 3DownNation, Lions’ president Duane Vienneau acknowledged that there would be difficulties with the team’s current training camp setup in Kamloops under the CFL’s new timeline, but that they are not seen as insurmountable.
“It’s certainly not going to be harder than getting kicked out of BC Place and building a stadium in Kelowna,” he joked, referring to the team’s current eviction due to the FIFA World Cup.
“Honestly, it’s a consequence that I personally didn’t prethink of. OK, we’re starting the season now, and then you do the rollback, and this is the date we start, but it never really kicked in like, ‘Holy smokes, school’s still going to be in at TRU.’ We’re going to have some challenges there, but we’ll figure out what the solution is.”
Where there aren’t students, there may be snow. A spring storm dropped 10 centimetres on parts of the prairies last week, which raises questions about how teams will adapt if forced to evaluate 100 pro football hopefuls in a blizzard.
Decision-makers understand that challenges await them due to the earlier start date in 2027, but believe they pale in comparison to the potential revenue growth opportunities that come from playing more games in the more profitable summer months. Football operations departments will be asked to adapt to the new normal of uncertainty and delays because the business side demands it, as is so often the case.
GMs are concerned, but they won’t lose sleep over the issues — too many other things are already keeping them awake.
“We’ll deal with it. Honestly, I haven’t thought too much about it,” Walters admitted. “As soon as (Bombers president Wade Miller) was going over it, and I heard ‘2027,’ I sort of stopped listening and said, ‘That sounds like a next year thing to worry about.’ We’ve got our own things to worry about in 2026.”
