MORE TRAINING CAMP PRACTICES CANCELLED AS CFL STRIKE CONTINUES

The cooling off process continues for the CFL and CFL Players’ Association. As of Monday, the two sides hadn’t rescheduled contact talks after negotiations broke off Saturday, hours before the collective bargaining agreement was set to expire. That put players on seven of the league’s nine teams in a legal strike position at 12:01 a.m. ET on Sunday. Both the Calgary Stampeders and Edmonton Elks opened training camp as scheduled Sunday. Their players won’t be in a legal strike position until later this week, as per Alberta’s labour laws. A major sticking point appears to be the Canadian ratio. The CFL is proposing that an American player who’s been in the league for at least four years or played with the same team for at least three years, would become a nationalized American who would count as a Canadian on the roster. Each CFL roster would still have at least seven national starters, with at least six being Canadian as the seventh could be either the nationalized American or an additional Canadian. The previous collective bargaining agreement, which expired at midnight ET on Saturday, called for 21 Canadians on a roster, with at least seven being starters.