Salaries in CFL?

Question

What would the average salary of a starter at a skill position such as LB for the cfl. could you add a source for your information as well. Thanks

Answer 1

Minimum salaries in the CFL this year are $30,000 for rookies and $32,000 for veterans. The minimum increases to $35,000 next year as a result of the CFL’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement. The average CFL salary is about $45,000 Canadian.

    Starters, excluding quarterbacks, can command anywhere between $60,000 and $120,000, depending on their position. Quarterbacks are generally the highest-paid players, making between $150,000 and $300,000.

Answer 2

I think the average salary could be $45000.  The other answer assumes that because the salary cap is 4 million that teams pay out the full 4 million.

Answer 3

The QBs bring the average way up.  A Casey Printers or Ricky Ray makes about 400 K a year.  A defensive superstar might make 100K, but your average starter probably makes about 40-50 thousand a year.

Answer 4

The average CFL salary is $100k, not $45k as in the link below.  The cap is just under $4 million, and there are 40 roster players per team, so that averages just under $100k per player.  

I suspect that starting QBs average around close to $300k, so they tend to skew the overall average.  Printers will make $400k in 2008, Calvillo must be at $300k or more, as is Ricky Ray and Kerry Joseph.

There aren't a lot of excess players on a CFL team like there are in the NFL, so there aren't a lot of fringe players that skew the salary averages downward.

Anyway, I would expect a veteran LB with decent stats would command about $125k, maybe a bit more.

Note: When the cap was raised from 2.6 to 3.8 million there were already three teams that were over the new cap and the spread between the top payroll and the lowest payroll was only $700k.  The CFL cap is a running joke in Canada.  Montreal ignores the cap.

DO THE MATH: The cap in '07 was actually $4.05 million.  Starting QBs skew the average, so we'll assume that all starting QBs earn as much as Ricky Ray will earn in '08, $500k (Joesph earned $230k in '07).  Remove the QB salary from the equation and the max payroll for our purposes is now $3.55 million, but lets still assume that ALL the teams are $700k below the cap and have a payroll of $2.85 million for the non-QBs.  $2.85 million divided by 39 is $73,076.92 which is still a lot more than $45k.