REGINA — It may be the only time in the history of sport when the ‘B’ sample doesn’t match the ‘A.’

For the past two or three years, the paranoid control freaks who populate the football ops offices around the Canadian Football League have managed to turn the once fan and media user-friendly nine-team circuit into one of the most user-unfriendly in all of pro sports.

But look at what we have here with CFL Week. What we’re likely to experience with this week’s pilot project is the most fan and media user-friendly event ever. The ‘B’ sample is going to be unbelievable.

As president of the Football Reporters of Canada, your correspondent was more than familiar with the ‘A’ sample last season.

The NFL media policy requires that dressing rooms open for 45 minutes a day, four days a week, in order for media to gather material to deliver on multiple platforms to the fans.

The CFL was down to zero. Zilch.

During my term as president of the FRC, we managed to get the rooms open for one day a week in eight of the nine cities in the league. Edmonton, for decades the media-access capital of the CFL and former flagship franchise of the league in all areas involving image and class, remained at none.

What we have here this week will be complete culture shock.

The CFL is flying in 50 of its top players for two days of unprecedented media access. There will be press conferences with all the coaches and all the general managers later in the week.

Forty-three members of the media will be in position, starting Tuesday morning, to collect content for the coming season.

It will be interesting to see how the media reacts to this. All I can tell you is that Postmedia will be here in force and TSN considers this a highly important week for its season of coverage.

“CFL Week will be extremely beneficial to us,” said TSN vice-president and executive producer Paul Graham, a man who went through a lot of his own battles on the access front last year, including the live microphone controversy.

“I think this is a terrific initiative by the CFL. The league has done a tremendous job of getting all the parties together, basically under one roof, with some innovative ideas. It can only be beneficial to all of us if we are having CFL conversations months from the start of the season. And Regina is the perfect place to do this.

“TSN gets a couple of days, with full access to the star players, to capture action poses, headshots and promotional material. It gives us a great head start to the production and design of CFL on TSN for 2017.

“We will also have daily reports on SportsCentre in addition to a strong social media presence. The hope is this becomes an annual event.”

Bev Wake, Postmedia’s senior executive sports producer, agrees.

“This gives us an opportunity to sit down with the stars of the game, away from the field of play, and talk to them in ways we normally can’t,” she said. “This will allow us to tell better stories not only in advance of the season, but once it begins. And that’s good for the fans.”

The CFL website also has ambitious plans and Saskatchewan media will be all over the event. In a way, the CFL has found a new way to do some of the things it used to do.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there used to be an event the CFL called ‘The Skywriters Tour.’ During training camp, sportswriters from throughout the Western Conference used to fly from training camp to training camp, interviewing coaches, general managers and star players from the teams. The Skywriters Tour effectively educated everybody about the events of the off-season and created a buzz around the league for the coming season.

Way back when, the league also used to have an all-star game — and taped skills competition to run during telecasts during the season — where the best players had a chance to hang out and socialize. There also used to be the coach-of-the- year event, held in Edmonton annually, with the league meetings involved and used to kick off a new season.

The idea this year is to create the same effect by flying anybody who is anybody in the league to one giant festival of Canadian football to create a heaping helping of hype to launch the season.

There’s way more involved than two days of interviewing 50 football players and another day of grilling the coaches and general managers.

On Wednesday, the Canadian Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017 will be introduced at the new Mosaic Stadium, where the announcement will become a far greater occasion than ever before.

Also added is a free five-day Fan Fest — a family-friendly, interactive production with autograph sessions, player Q&A events, selfie photo-ops and a ‘Skills Zone’ with drills and activities.

There’s also a neighbouring Fan Cave, along the lines of the ‘Spirit of Edmonton’ or ‘Riderville’ concept so popular during Grey Cups, which will feature football-themed entertainment such as CFL head of official Glen Johnson’s ‘You Make The Call’ event, CFL statistician Steve Daniels’ ‘Ultimate CFL Trivia Contest’ tweet-ups and plenty of beer.

On Thursday, there will be a panel event featuring three generations of CFL quarterbacks — Warren Moon, Anthony Calvillo and Mike Reilly — who will join TSN’s Rod Smith for a discussion titled ‘Achieving Excellence, Overcoming Barriers,’ sponsored by Athabasca University.

The CFL combine, involving the league’s top prospects, completes CFL Week on the weekend.

There’s no admission charge for events, other than the VIP Hall of Fame event ($250) and the combine sessions, which have already sold out.

“This is all definitely part of commissioner Jeffrey Orridge’s strategy to extend our reach to the fans,” said Christina Litz, the new vice-president of content and marketing, the point person for the project.

“Our fans are passionate and we’ve heard from fans how they want more engagement with the league. We just weren’t doing enough in the off-season to engage with them to bring great content and great ways for them to get excited about the upcoming season,” she said. “At the same time we have a lot of things we have to do, like the combine and the draft, and last year we created a new event with TSN and Adidas to do a media shoot, which we did in Toronto. We brought about 50 players to Toronto ... to do a shoot to unveil the new Adidas uniforms and combined it with the TSN-RDS shoot that they’d done at night, going from training camp to training camp, that I don’t think anybody really loved. We did a bit of a media car wash there, as well.”

The idea this year was to build on that success.

“We had happy players who loved the fact that they were being treated like the stars that we know that they are,” she said.

“There was just so much opportunity to do more with everybody in one place. Taking those two things, we started to think what more can we do and began to think of bringing this directly to our fans, live and in person, as well. In a way it grew to kind of a Grey Cup activation. The thought was: ‘What if we did that and put a few of these things together and added some layers to that. When we started talking to fans it became a no- brainer. That’s how ‘Mark’s CFL Week’ was born.”

The changes were made, she said, in large part due to feedback from fans.

“They’re coming from not just all over Saskatchewan but from all over Canada. We wanted to make sure it was going to be a really fun experience for them. At the same time, we’ve had a lot of support from our CFL corporate partners. Once Mark’s expressed interest to make this bigger and a number of other partners signed on to be a part of it, it helped us fund what we’re doing.”

It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that the budget for the event will be well over $1-million, when you consider airfare and hotel rooms for 50 CFL stars, prospects, CFL staff and everybody else involved.

“It’s a substantial investment from our ownership group and it goes to investing in what we’re doing,” Litz said.

Fantastic. But if the same people won’t stand up to the football ops people during the season to accomplish the same goal when it doesn’t cost a dime?

Mindboggling.

CFL STARS ON PARADE

Toronto Argonauts: Ricky Ray, Drew Willy, Shawn Lemon, Anthony Coombs, Brian Jones, Jeff Fuller, Winston Venable.

Hamilton Tiger-Cats: Zach Collaros, Luke Tasker, Simoni Lawrence, Ted Laurent, Terrence Toliver.

Calgary Stampeders: Bo Levi Mitchell, Charleston Hughes, DaVaris Daniels, Jerome Messam, Marquay McDaniel, Alex Singleton

Montreal Alouettes: S.J. Green, Bear Woods, Darian Durant, Samuel Giguere, Stefan Logan, Tyrell Sutton, Ernest Jackson, Nik Lewis

Saskatchewan Roughriders: Naaman Roosevelt, Henoc Muamba, Rob Bagg, Willie Jefferson, Kevin Glenn, Derek Dennis, Chad Owens.

B.C. Lions: Chris Rainey, Emmanuel Arceneaux, Jeremiah Johnson, Jonathon Jennings, Solomon Elimimian, Bryan Burnham, Chris Williams.

Edmonton Eskimos: Adarius Bowman, Almondo Sewell, John White, Mike Reilly, J.C. Sherritt, Odell Willis.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers: Andrew Harris, Jamaal Westerman, Matt Nichols, Taylor Loffler, Weston Dressler.

Ottawa Redblacks: Greg Ellingson, Brad Sinopoli, Trevor Harris, Antoine Pruneau, Kenny Shaw, Diontae Spencer.

tjones@postmedia.com