Two provisions in the CFL’s new CBA deserve a closer look The CFL’s new collective agreement contains mostly tweaks and minor concessions, but there are a couple of exceptions that could have a dramatic effect on the game, Dave Naylor writes.

Dave Naylor TSN Football Insider Follow|Archive

For the most part, the Canadian Football League’s new collective agreement is a status-quo document, one mostly of tweaks and minor concessions that won’t meaningfully affect the way the game is managed or played.

There are, however, a couple of exceptions that deserve a closer look because they could potentially have a dramatic effect on the game.

The first is the provision allowing teams to replace any Canadian starter who suffers an in-game injury with a veteran American, defined in the new agreement as a player with at least four years in the CFL or three with his current team.

Any rule tied to a player being injured is potentially problematic. But when that rule opens the door for a team to help itself through an injury, well, everyone knows what happens when you give coaches a way to gain an advantage. They’re going to use it.

It’s not hard to see how any head coach might use this as a way to improve his team by having a weaker Canadian starter go down with an injury early in a game so he can be replaced by a veteran American.

Here’s an extreme example to illustrate the point: Hamilton cornerback Delvin Breaux starts every game for the Tiger-Cats and is considered among the league’s very best defensive players. He has three years in the CFL, all with the Tiger-Cats.

Let’s say that instead of starting Breaux at cornerback, the Tiger-Cats list him as a backup and start a Canadian at corner, maybe even someone who has never played the position in his life.

On the first play of the game, that Canadian player goes down with an ankle injury and is replaced by Breaux, an NFL-level talent who instantly makes the Tiger-Cats a better team and requires Hamilton to play only six Canadians for the rest of the game.

Every coach is going to be tempted to use this to their advantage. And once one does, they all will. Perhaps not in ways as obvious as the example cited above, but in more subtle ways that could still affect the outcome of games.

How can that be prevented? No one from either the league or players’ side of things seems to know, beyond suggesting that there is time to discuss the matter since the rule doesn't come into play until next season.

“It's early days for the new agreement,” said commissioner Randy Ambrosie. “We will work with our players and coaches in the months ahead.”

Also worthy of attention is the provision that allows an American or global player graduating with a degree from a U Sports school to automatically quality as a Canadian in the CFL, as long as he has played at least three seasons at a Canadian university.

That won’t have a huge effect on the CFL right away, but its implications could shift the league’s player composition over the next five to 10 years, especially if U Sports coaches are able to use the provision to recruit more players from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere to their programs.

Doing so could help improve the quality of the play in U Sports football by making it more attractive for foreign players to pursue a future in the sport through the Canadian development system.

It could also potentially send a lot of non-Canadians to the CFL as Canadians, which means the actual number of Canadian-born players in the league could decrease without changing the ratio requiring each team to dress 21 and start seven.

Providing such a pathway for foreign players serves the league’s desire to globalize its player pool to help drive interest in foreign markets for television. With football growing around the world and more and more European players making it to college football in the U.S., imagining a league composed of players from around the world is no longer a pipe dream.

But it’s not hard to see the overall direction the league is heading when it comes to Canadian content.

A few years back, the league loosened the definition of a Canadian player to include anyone with citizenship, which allowed players like Southern California native Alex Singleton to count as domestic because of his Canadian mother.

Giving U Sports programs the ability to bestow Canadian status to foreign players takes things a step further.