Trevor Hardy to the rescue

As a CFL fan you ask yourself again is the CFL serious about adhering to a Salary Cap? And the answer you come up with again is hopefully yes but in reality there is a nagging notion that the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup before the CFL implements and enforces a realistic Salary Cost Management System.

The League has created a new position that of a Capologist as in one who manages and controls the Salary Cap and the official title is Director of Salary Expenditure Reporting or in short Doser.

This position will be held by Trevor Hardy who most of you have never heard of before.He is an accountant from Burlington Ontario.who tired of the routines of normal business accounting liked the challenge of monitoring the CFL cost structure and stated when being interviewed for the job that it would be ridiculous for the league to waste everybodys time if the Cost Management System does not have any teeth in it and this statement so impressed the CFL powers that be that there was very little hesitation in hiring him.

It appears that there indeed will be penalties in place for exceeding the cap and according to Hardy the teams have accepted this concept and one has to assume that Hardy is not some maverick, wet behind the ears figure filbert who has been snowed by league officials.Hardy tells all and sundry who will listen to him that there will be a very severe penalty structure put in place for situations where there is no disclosure of outside deals where players make additional cash from affiliated companies of the Private owners of which there are currently five.which is a ploy that has obviously hurt Saskatchewan and Winnipeg two of the three publicly owned teams in the past.

Hardy himself will audit each of the eight teams after the sixth, twelth and eighteenth games of the season and report his findings to the Commissioner who will in turn present the results to the Board of Governors at the leagues annual general meeting.usually scheduled for sometime in April.

There is a feeling that the league will then disclose to the public who the offending teams are something that was never done in the past.

It goes without saying that Trevor Hardy will be viewed with a suspicious eye when he arrives in a teams office to make one of the three audits but at least this appears to be the most genuine attempt we have ever seen to abide by and enforce a logical and sensible Salary Management System.

The non believers say even though the league appears to be serious they quickly point out that the decision to in fact put a real system in place for 2007 was announced in 2006 and it allowed the teams to front load contracts of their stars by giving them bonus dollars with no restrictions on amounts up to last years Grey Cup on November 19th in Winnipeg. So the naysayers will correctly point out how ludicrous this situation is with the rich teams giving out exorbitant bonus dollars such as the BC Lions giving second team Quarterback Buck Pierce a cool one hundred thousand dollar bonus prior to the Lions playing in The Grey Cup game in Winnipeg and then reporting his 2007 salary as two hundred thousand when it should be reported as three hundred thousand.The Eskimos front loaded Mookie Mitchells contract the same way to the point where it goes on their books for 2007 at a ridiculous salary of fifty two thousand dollars.

So the fact that there was no reasonable limit put on these front loaded bonus dollars or whatever you want to call them indicates to the skeptics that as always the CFL teams find a way to beat the cap.

We wish Trevor Hardy the best of luck and it will be very interesting to see where things are at this time next year.