[Cecil Terwilliger]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

From the CFL CBA BTW

Section 17.01 basically states that you can have a 10 man practice roster, if you have a player that is not signed to a CFL agreement he can't practice with your team unless a standardized agreement is signed between the player and club and that player is added to the practice roster.

Here's where it gets tricky, if a player is signed to a standardized practice agreement the min he can get paid is $750 per week plus housing expenses, however if they are on that agreement the housing expenses don't count against the cap.

So here's the issue for the Riders, these are undeclared players that the Riders are paying to practice, but they are not on the practice or injured or regular rosters. But the Riders are paying them to practice and paying for their housing. At this point the entire compensation of those players would count as cap circumvention.

You cannot have more then 10 players on your practice roster except during the NFL cutdown period where it expands to 15. The Riders had players on the field at practice that were being paid to practice yet weren't on the roster, and they had no standardized agreement between players and teams. Its a huge circumvention.

Now the only other way that the player could practice on the team is under a player tryout but the tryouts can only last a day. The other teams were a little pissed off because Buddy Jackson's tryout was basically three weeks long.

Yeah but if the players are practicing outside of the main group and it is considered "tryouts" it could be seen as being outside of the CBA is my understanding.

As per article I posted yesterday:

It's unclear if the Riders having these unsigned players at practice (but not on the field until after practice ends) and meeting with coaches violates the rules. It's also unclear if there's anything to prohibit a team from paying players not on its roster (and the Roughriders are presumably compensating these guys in some way; it seems unlikely many would hang around for long without that) or from repeatedly "trying out" the same players.

I'm also really confused by everything 3downnation is posting. They have continually posted stuff immediately after other more reliable sources have tweeted or reported information that is often at odds with what they post. All their contributors seem like trustworthy sources but none of the TSN/newspaper/online sources seem to jive at this point.