Photo courtesy: CFL

The Canadian Football League discussed the possibility of implementing a draft for American talent during their offseason winter meetings, but have elected not to pursue the idea.

“We went through the intricacies of how an American draft might work. I think we’ve landed on, no, we’re going to stick with where we are,” commissioner Stewart Johnston told the media from Calgary. “We’ll continue the discussion. There may be some opportunity for a unique version of that, but nothing firm has come from that. Good discussion, no update beyond that.”

CFL teams currently sign incoming American talent as free agents, though each franchise is able to claim the exclusive rights to up to 45 prospective players at any given time by way of their negotiation list. Rights are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, and players can be added at any stage of their college or professional career, allowing teams to stash away high-value prospects for several years. While clubs can drop or trade players from the negotiation list at their discretion, players can only force their removal if they are not offered a minimum contract at their request.

The contents of CFL negotiation lists were a closely guarded secret for decades until 2018, when the league began bi-annual unveilings of 10 names for each team. Johnston went a step further in his first year as commissioner, making the information fully public in July and launching a database that updates daily with additions and removals.

However, increased transparency has not satiated critics of the system, who argue it is cumbersome for casual fans to understand and eliminates financial competition, which might draw more talent into the league, most importantly at the quarterback position. An American draft has long been raised as a flashier alternative, though it did not pass muster with the head coaches and general managers this year.

“We kind of generate ideas by putting a proposal forward for discussion, and the proposal we put out was, ‘How about a 10-round draft?’ From there, you can take the feedback, adjust it, or take the feedback and get rid of it,” Johnston explained.

“The feedback that we received was, okay, we are incredibly focused with a lot of resources put against the Canadian Draft. We also have the Global Draft, and we’ve got a negotiation list where we know and we’re managing American players through that process. As we talked it through, it just seemed like we were trying to find what the benefit is, and could we create something exciting and entertaining out of that. It just seemed like on a cost-benefit basis, it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Though enticing on its surface, the implementation of an American draft would face a number of logistical challenges. While supporters of the concept argue it could create a marketable offseason event, drawing from the same list of graduating collegiate athletes as the NFL Draft would prompt CFL teams to pick players who won’t come north for several years — if ever. Coupled with the limited college football fandom in Canada, the draft would be unlikely to create the desired excitement.

Even if the CFL chose to create its own prospect pool of players already committed to playing in the league, that would create other issues. One of the most fruitful windows for signing players occurs in the middle of the CFL season, after NFL teams have made their final roster cuts. Under this system, those players would either have to wait until the following year to enter the draft, bog down teams with a massive midseason supplemental draft, or be exempted from the selection process entirely, therefore undermining the draft and creating a path into the league that would be preferable.

In either scenario, the draft would be relatively toothless and could intensify the workload for CFL scouting staffs already stretched thin under the football operations cap. However, Johnston does not believe discussions around the concept were unproductive.

“This is what I love coming out of these meetings: you put a proposal like that, or just a thought-starter like that, in front of a group of football minds, and then all of a sudden the brainstorming happens, and you pivot right off of that,” he remarked.

“We went into a ton of different directions that maybe only were tangentially related to the original proposal, but cool ideas, and there were a number there. I’m not going to get into the specifics now, because they’re truly not baked at all, but great homework for league staff to take back and work on. Maybe a kernel of an idea that could turn into something — not an American draft, but something a little bit different. That was sort of the tone of the conversation.”

Some of those ideas might be applied to the CFL’s two existing drafts, which govern the allocation of Canadian and Global players. While the CFL Draft traces its origins back to 1953 and predates the league itself, it remains a relatively niche event with limited media coverage and interest from only the most hardcore fans.

Unlike the NFL Draft, which drew over 600,000 fans over three days in Green Bay last year and was watched by 7.5 million more on television, the CFL’s pick fest occurs remotely and is not even broadcast in its entirety. Even as the quality of the talent available has improved, the league has struggled to make the event marketable and, in 2025, saw its website crash in the middle of the proceedings.

It would appear that Johnston, a former television executive, would like a crack at changing that.

“I start with the first principle of these players being drafted in our Canadian Draft and our Global Draft, what an accomplishment that is. You got drafted to the Canadian Football League, and we want to make sure that’s recognized, acknowledged and celebrated. That’s very important,” he said.

“At the same time, you think about entertainment properties, and we want to make every aspect of our league, not just from Game 1 to Grey Cup, but from Jan. 1 to December 31, we want the CFL to be as entertaining as possible. We ran through a number of ideas specific to the Canadian draft on how we might improve the entertainment value of that. Nothing firm to report, but I can tell you that a discussion was had.”

That is good news for those who already follow the CFL Draft process, which will take place on Tuesday, April 28, this year.