Winning the Gray Cup immortalizes you in professional football history, enshrining your legacy alongside the legends in a centuries-old monument to Canadian excellence. It also happens that you will get paid.
Playoff compensation is a term that gets thrown around regularly during free agency as a reminder that if you shave a little off to join a contender, you might actually make more in the long run. However, these discussions rarely specify how much more.
While salaries and bonuses vary significantly during the regular season, every player on the active roster or injured list earns the same amount of money in the postseason. This means that for the CFL's highest paid players, such as starting cornerbacks, the playoff money could be less than their regular game checks. On the contrary, it could be a boon for those at the bottom of the lineup, as the combined amount received for playing in the Gray Cup is equal to about a third of the league's minimum salary.
Each stage of the playoffs is tied to a different dollar figure. In the East and West semifinals, players on participating teams earn $3,400. For members of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Calgary Stampeders, that was the size of their playoff earnings.
Teams finishing first in the division and receiving a first-round bye will also take home $3,400, plus another $3,600 for competing in the West or East finals. For the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and BC Lions, being eliminated in the second round meant an extra $7,000 in playoff earnings.
Gray Cup is where real money is made and the only game where the rewards are determined by results. If you lose your shot at the CFL title, you'll get $8,000 to drown your sorrows in, more than doubling your earnings for the rest of the playoffs. In total, players who were active or injured in all three games of the Montreal Alouettes' postseason series earned $15,000.
However, to the winner go the spoils, and winning the Gray Cup comes with much more than just champagne and confetti. By lifting this coveted cup, you'll receive a one-time payout of $16,000 and a free championship ring. That's the equivalent of about four CFL games at minimum wage.
For the winning Saskatchewan Roughriders, this meant total playoff earnings of $23,000 per player. That's a significant gain for three extra weeks of work, especially when you consider that at the end of it you'll have to go to a party and may never have to pay for a drink in Regina again.
Post-season compensation is not included in the salary cap, so teams can rest easy knowing that reaching the end goal won't impact their budget. However, the amount they must pay players could be increased in the future, depending on the application of the revenue growth sharing formula in the collective bargaining agreement.
If changes are not implemented before then, the mandatory increase will occur once certain league revenues reach $300 million. As a result, players will receive an additional $500 for a playoff game, $2,000 for a Gray Cup loss and $4,000 for a Gray Cup win.
