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CFL to bar suspended NFL players
Last Updated: Sunday, November 19, 2006 | 10:16 PM ET
CBC Sports
With the Grey Cup only a few days away, CFL commissioner Tom Wright said the league will bar players suspended from the NFL starting in 2007.

The issue came to the forefront this season when suspended NFL star Ricky Williams was allowed to play with the Toronto Argonauts.

Ricky Williams rushed for 526 yards and a pair of touchdowns in his first CFL season.
(Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press) Williams's move to Toronto caused controversy because the Miami Dolphins running back has a history of positive drug tests for marijuana and is currently serving a one-year suspension from the NFL.

Under the new rule, Williams would no longer be welcome in the CFL.

Former Calgary Stampeder Greg Frers, now an analyst for the CFL on CBC, said the league had to take action to stop this kind of thing from happening again.

"I think it's the right thing to do. If [Williams] comes in and is able to get employment in the CFL, that comes with levels of baggage and messaging that we don't want to send to our fans," Frers told CBC Radio.

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Saskatchewan Roughriders general manager Eric Tillman doesn't see things the same way.

"The vast majority of players in this league are good quality people. And, candidly, some of the people that have made statements with regards to Ricky Williams I think were unbelievably hypocritical," Tillman said.

The rule also doesn't make sense to Michael Fletcher, William's teammate with the Argonauts.

"Ricky's not a criminal. You know, apparently, he's had drug problems or marijuana or whatever. So you don't [have] to worry about him going down the street getting into trouble; he's not one of those guys. I mean if it's not a criminal offence, I think guys should definitely have a second chance," Fletcher said.

Duane Forde, who played 12 years in the CFL, says the league has a record of giving second chances to a number of players with violent pasts and criminal records over the years.

He points to the example of former Montreal Alouettes running back Lawrence Phillips who, according to Forde, was accused of far worse than Williams.

"It's a less serious offence than a guy who beat up his girlfriend, dragged her down a set of stairs or even more recently tried to run down a group of kids with his car," Forde said.

Forde says what he finds troubling is that a player with a violent past such as Phillips could still play in the CFL under the new policy. If the player isn't suspended in the NFL, most likely, he'll still be allowed on the field in Canada.

The CFL says one of the reasons for the ban is to maintain a good relationship with the NFL.

Hello Arena League!!! Seriously the only reason vcik would come back to any football league is just to play football, as the money won't be an issue. He will still be living on easy street, even if he never plays another down.

BB, although Vick will certainly be living a lot better than most of America, I think you overestimate how much hard capital Vick possesses. $30 million is going to be a major hit to anyone's pocket whether it's Michael Vick or Bill Gates. That's just not money you happy to let walk away.

After paying the Falcons, Vick will have netted almost nothing this past year in actual money.

There is no guarantee that he will have to give up the signing bonus. Plus I am sure he would have at least 20-30 mill left over from his other deals. Remember he was making an average of 37.5 mill a year. Even a conservative portfolio would return 5-7% on that. I'm curious what makes you think you know anymore about his net-worth than i do??? My point was never that returning the 30 mil wouldn't hurt him .My point was that it wouldn't significantly hurt his lifestyle (after prison of course).

Too early to rely on this with Vick's ability to put the "butts in the seats". With the CFL's larger field, rules, etc, Vick would be exciting up there. As they say, "Money Talks". Some owners may say rules are made to be changed.

Pudge, Pudge, Pudge,...Vick has been an NFL star since 2002. He's garnered not just shoe endorsements but also airline deals,...his face was on every other billboard along I-75, I-85 and GA 400. The dude is richer than you and I will ever be unless we win the lottery. To even suggest he doesn't have hard cash is really,...pffft man.

Last I heard, signing bonuses are guranteed. In that *light* it is logical to assume that, after taxes, Michael Mexico Vick is at least worth $15 mil. Add the advertisement deals? Add the Michael Vick experience commercial? Give me a freaking break. And don't insult anyone's intelligence again like that please.

Bill Gates and $30 mil is another thing,...you have no idea of the vast amount of money Gates deals with daily, nor do I for that matter. But to defend Vick with this is just funny.

Oh ya,...Vick will be do just fine with all the monies he's collected.

PB, but you're under the assumption that I believe most people are under that the wealthy tend to save all their money. I highly doubt that Vick just has even $10 million sitting in a bank somewhere.

Yes, Vick makes on average $37.5 million a year, but think about it, whatever your salary was on an annual basis, if one day someone asked you to write a check roughly 75% (which is what $28 milion would correspond to) of your annual salary, do you think you can cover it? Even if you structured it to pay in installments, I'm sure that won't be an easy thing to come up with.

Vick received a $7 million bonus this year, that was guaranteed, for all we know when Nike and all the other companies basically put his endorsements on hold or canceled them outright, he might have only got some or none of the money due to him this year.

I'm not saying Vick lacks hard cash, but who just has $28 million sitting around? Not many people. Even Arthur Blank, who is said to be worth $1.3 billion, probably can't just come up with $28 million out of a hat. I'm sure if Arthur Blank wanted to spend that kind of money it would take him months to get a handle on those funds in order to invest/spend/etc. it.

What Vick's worth is, I'm not sure, but it's certainly a small fraction of what Blank's is.

I don't know Michael Vick's financial situation, so I can't say, but I don't make the automatic assumption that he's like Scrooge McDuck and has a money bin where the $200 or so million he's made over the past 5 years is just sitting there. Michael Vick has bills too, including paying for at least 3 houses (his own, his mom's, and the infamous one in Smithfield).

PB, you're talking about worth, which is much different than what you actually have in hard capital as they say. I'm no business or econ major, but I do know that little tidbit. I don't deny that Vick probably has millions of dollars laying around. But I won't go as far as to say that it reaches up to $28 million. And even if he did, and was able to pay that, he could simply shrug that off and say, "Oh well, I have 5 times that still in the bank."

Bill Gates is worth so much money I believe because of all the shares he has in Microsoft. I'm not positive, but in order for Bill Gates to actually see all that money he's said to be worth, he has to sell those shares.

Think about it this way, if you made X amount of money in annual salary, and for whatever reason you were forced to pay 75% of it to some company or entity, but for whatever reason you just happened to have that money saved up as your nest egg or emergency money, or whatever, would you be okay? Also don't forget to factor in that after you made this large payment, that you essentially become unemployed, with no forseeable employment in the near future. And even if you found employment, the most you probably would make is less than 2 or 3% of what you made before.

I'm not trying to insult anybody's intelligence, but you PB and BB seem to be making this what I deem false assumption that whatever money Vick pays to Blank isn't going to affect him, isn't going to be a major hit in the wallet. It probably won't bankrupt him, but he's not going to shrug it off which the two of you seem to imply that he will. Who isn't going to miss $28 million? Even if it's half that, who isn't going to miss that money?

If $28 million went missing from Bill Gates bank account tomorrow, I'm sure a few people are going to get some angry phone calls and the unemployment line will be a bit longer the day after.

Like pretty much everything else concerning Vick, you are wrong here too Pudge. Watch how it all plays out.

I never said "Vick wouldn't be hurt" by losing 28 mil. I said he could still live very comfortably IF he lost the 28 mil...which I don't think he will lose anyway. You can't possibly compare a person who has earned almost 200 mil before taxes, to a "normal person". I don't want to go all economics professor on you but there are obvious reasons for this.

As far as 28 mil hurting BGates.....that is by far the funniest thing i have heard in quite some time.

I liked the Scrooge McDuck reference best.

If it weren't for my daughter watching that cartoon when she was a kid, I'd have never known who you were refering to.

Not a bad moniker for Blank at all! Now if we can get Arthur to speak with a Scottish brogue(sp?);)

if he's got a legitimate money manager he's good to go for the rest of his life. if he's managing his own money (which i think is unlikely) then that's a different story. like bbrain said, he could probably just live his current extravagant lifestyle on the interest alone. three homes? that's really nothing when your making at least 7-10 million a year on interest. also, think about all the endorsements we have no idea about in europe and asia. again, a lot will depend upon who's managing the finances.

You all forget the Feds draconian asset seizure abilities. Vick better hope he did not comingle his illgotten gains with his legitimate income because he may lose both....

How the Hell else was Vick able to fund such an enterprise? You already knew this. And so did most people,...

Live comfortably, yes I'm sure, when it's put on "normal" standards that you, I, and most of hte rest of this country lives on. But his normal standards would be living in multi-million dollar homes and having 6 or 7 cars that he never drives parked in the garage.

Hey, I'm not saying we should all shed a tear because Michael Vick will have to downgrade from 15,000 square feet to 5,000.


So now you don't think the Falcons will pursue that bonus money? Or are you saying that the money he will have to pay will be considerably less than that? I don't know how much the Falcons will ask Vick to give back, but from a rather reliable resource when it comes to cap issues (Pro Football Talk.com), says that if tomorrow the Falcons approached him, it could be up to $28 million. That to me is a little more reliable than some gut feeling you may have on this issue BB, unless of course you have some other source of info.


Yes you can. It seems to me that you share a misconception that I pointed out before that rich people don't spend money. Who saves 60-80% of their paychecks like you suggest Vick has? I'm sure when you're fantasizing about what you would do with $1 million, you're not thinking about putting $800,000 in the bank to save up for that rainy day 5-6 years down the road when the giver is going to ask for it back.

All we know in terms of money Vick has earned thus far in '07 is that he earned $7 million on a roster bonus, and then earned what amounts to be $325,000 in training camp money during his "leave of absence." Beyond that we have no clue what he earned.

The $37.5 million that was reported here was from 2005. That figure is from Forbes list, that tallies I believe salaries from one June to the next. Between June 2004 and June 2005, Michael Vick earned $5 million in '04 base salary, received a $7.5 million signing bonus in December '04, and then received another $22.5 million bonus in March '05. For those of you that aren't econ professors, that total comes out to $35 million. So assuming Forbes did a good job crunching their numbers, that would leave about $2.5 million in annual money from non-football related issues.

In the actual '05 article, found here: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/53/20CG.html

They mention Vick's $30 million signing bonus. Let's then assume that Forbes didn't factor in his '04 base salary, but just the bonus money, that would mean that Vick earned $7.5 million in endorsements in '05.

Judging from this article: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oreg ... xml&coll=7

That latter figure seems to be the appropriate one. Again, most of Vick's endorsements have been eiher cancelled or suspended, even his supposedly most lucrative one at Nike. So again, how much of that $7 or so million has Vick received this year?

Even if we were to argue that he managed to get all of it, that would still mean that Vick roughly pocketed about $15 or so million this year. We're all envious of that money of course, but what happens when Vick is asked to pay nearly twice that back and then becomes unemployed. He can't play in the CFL, and the highest paid player int he AFL is Tony Graziani who pockets about $150,000, less than half of what Casey Bramlet will make this season.

Oh, I forgot that little tidbit that Michael Vick might actually be in jail for a number of months/years. I'm sure he'll be able to make loads of dollars then. And then when he gets out, I'm sure people are going to be fawning to pay millions to an ex-con QB that hasn't played football for some time and was rather average the last time they saw him.

So again, while I won't be losing any sleep over the financial issues that Michael Vick is set to endure nor do I expect anyone else to, I do think it's going to be an issue that is much closer to struggle as opposed to cakewalk which you implied.

Where do you see "cakewalk"???? I said that first I don't think he will have to pay back the bonus money. Second I said if HE DID, he still would able to live comfortably. Your definition is yours, not mine. I'm positive that Vick's financial advisors, a good team out of Wash D.C. that he hired even before he was drafted, was very careful with his earned income. The par for the course in these situations is the athlete receives an allowance, more than enough to do what ever he likes. The mother, his children and his relatives are also given an allowance to live on.The rest is carefully bugeted, and even more carefully invested. We are not talking about chumps here.

Vicks assets, tax shelters and charities all figure into this financial plan. Also figured into every plan is an emergency scenario, which with all athletes is a must. This plan is sort of like a retirement portfolio, in case Vick can't continue for what ever reason. They figure out what type of lifestyle the client wants and adjust the portfolio accordingly. Even in the WCS (worst case scenario), Vick will still be able to maintain his current lifestyle. As we speak there are people working to remake his image when he gets out of jail. Book rights, film rights...first person accounts....etc. Once you receive a couple of contracts in the tens of millions of dollars, and you have a competent system set up, you really don't have any worries. Vick really didn't live an extravagant lifestyle, by all accounts he was somewhat of a homebody.He will be just fine.

Then define "live comfortably." You assumed that Vick had $20-30 million in the bank left over from his endorsement deals in years past, which would equate to him saving nearly every penny of that money from the last 3-4 years.

I'm not arguing that Vick is going to file for bankrupcy the day after Blank asks him to pay his money, I'm just saying that Vick may have to undergo a significant if not major overhaul in lifestyle after he pays him his money.

I'm thinking along the lines of selling a house or two, some cars, etc. Yes, living in a 7000 square foot house is certain comfortable by normal standards, but if you were living in a house that was well over 10000 feet, you could tell the difference. Now, I don't know the square footage on Vick's house(s) but I'm using them as examples of the type of lifestyle change Vick could undergo.

And why don't you think that Vick won't have to pay back the bonus money? BEcause Blank won't ask for it, or because there's some loophole in his contract that won't require him to pay it, or he will never be found in default of his contract?

Yes....Blank won't ask for it. Blank will just cut him and that will be that.