The Edmonton Eskimos got a crash course on the rule changes for the upcoming CFL season on Monday, during a visit by CFL vice-president of officiating Glen Johnson.

On his eighth stop out of the nine-team tour that wraps up in Toronto on Tuesday, Johnson met with Eskimos coaches during a three-hour session where they discussed everything from the new no-contact rule for pass defenders to the well-documented changes to the point-after touchdown.

Across the categories of preventable penalties (no-yards, objectionable conduct), technical penalties (like holding, pass-interference), and roughness penalties (roughing the passer, unnecessary roughness), all three saw an increase from last year.

“We had a lot of new jobs in the league last year with expansion,” said Johnson. “We had a lot of injuries that also meant more new players coming in.

“We’re trying to make the rules simpler.”

The end objective is not only to make the game more exciting and skill-driven, but also speed things up. Or, at least, appear to.

“Most would say our games were longer last year,” said Johnson. “They weren’t.”

In fact, the league average was only about 20 seconds longer than the two-hour-and-fifty-five-minute standard over the past few seasons.

The problem is, of the 155 plays featured in a typical game, Johnson said there were also 82 stoppages that tended to slow things down.

“That’s a lot of stoppages, so it just felt longer,” said Johnson, calling last season the Year of the Defence across the league, which saw the NFL outscore the CFL for the first time in decades.

So it’s not surprising the CFL rules committee was looking to open up the offence by getting rid of the clutching and grabbing while creating more space for players to play.

“This will change our game, the way people play on offence,” said Johnson, who expects a penalty-plagued period early in the season as players catch up with the learning curve. “This is a significant change, probably one of the biggest ones we’ve made to the game in the last 20 years.”

Which is good news for some teams and potentially devastating for others, depending on whether their strength lies on offence or defence.

“Exactly, and we did change on both sides of the ball,” Johnson said.

Either way, it will be an adjustment period for the Eskimos as much as any team, considering Edmonton led the league in both net offence gained and surrendered.

While scoring is expected to increase this season, the way in which points are put up will change, especially considering the fact that extra-point attempts will be moved back and two-point converts moved closer.

“When you’re in the meetings you can see the coaches like (Craig) Dickenson, strategizing,” Johnson said of the Eskimos special-teams co-ordinator. “The coaching staff was very receptive. They came very prepared, they asked a lot of great questions.

“We debated some things, like we always do. But I believe we’re on the same page and a lot of that comes from the leadership of the head coach.”

Chris Jones has embraced the new law of the land and, according to Johnson, is well underway in developing ways to outcoach his opponents in it.

“They just embraced that, so we spent a lot of the time talking about, ‘What are we going to call? Are we going to be consistent?” Johnson said. “And they can learn how to coach the players away from that.”

CONTROVERSY FOLLOWS ZEBRAS

They’re the butt of sports fans’ bad jokes, loved to be hated and always half wrong, even when they’re right.

While it’s not like anyone’s ever hoisted a CFL official on their shoulders and paraded them out of the stadium, life in stripes hasn’t gotten any easier with recent advances in technology.

With digital television, now ever call made is scrutinized by countless armchair officials at home, who have the ability to pause, rewind and even change the angle on any and every play in the game.

So, just in case they weren’t under enough scrutiny before …

“Officiating has changed,” said CFL vice-president of officiating Glen Johnson. “I’ve been a professional official for over 25 years and back when I started, the VHS tapes were pretty grainy.”

To put it in perspective, back in 1990, cellphones were about as big and heavy as a brick, with more reception problems than the Saskatchewan Roughriders had without a healthy Darian Durant for much of last year.

“Now, we’re full hi-def with angles all over the place,” Johnson said. “It does get harder but we continue to chase perfection every game.”

The human element has always been part of the game when it comes to officiating live action. But that may not be the case one day. More and more, technology is being streamlined into taking the guess work out of calling a play.

“Will replay expand? I don’t know, maybe,” Johnson said. “We use replay to get things right. It’s been helpful so far and we continue to talk about that at the rules level, but our officials work very hard and our officials are as good as any other professional sport.”

The difference between a professional official out on the field and a biased fan with a remote in hand is that the refs have to call the action as it happens at breakneck speed.

“One of the things I think people need to understand is it’s always about the angle of the official whose job it is to make that call,” Johnson said. “They don’t have the 360-degree angle. They don’t have five times to look at it and they do a great job.”

Even with half the viewers in disagreement at any given time and the other half waiting to erupt over the next call.

REF SCHOOL

The league’s 44 officials are holding a four-day training camp of their own in Mississauga, Ont., on Thursday. After that, the CFL will continue with a program that was piloted in Edmonton last season, which saw officials attending training camp and one day of practice per week throughout the season.

“We are very serious about getting them better and making them accountable for what they do,” Johnson said.

gerry.moddejonge@sunmedia.ca

2014 Penalty Trends