Episode 04: Jeffrey Orridge, Former CFL Commissioner

Dr. Murphy:

From the corner of Bay and Dundas in downtown Toronto, this is Like Nobody's Business, a podcast of thought leadership and business innovation. I'm Dr. Steven Murphy, dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Jeffrey Orridge was the 13th commissioner of the Canadian Football League from 2015 to 2017 and was chief operating officer for the Right To Play charity from 2007 to 2011. Jeffrey joined TRSM distinguished counsel in residence, Ralph Lean, to talk directly to TRSM students about law in business as part of the lecture series, Law, Business, and Politics: The Real World.

Ralph Lean:

They have a Harvard educated lawyer. You know how hard it is to get into Harvard. A Harvard educated lawyer, my friend Jeffrey. Very impressive. You are at Harvard as well, at a time, you told me, with a guy called Obama. He was there at the same time.

Jeffrey Orridge:

He was right after me, yeah.

Ralph Lean:

You played basketball there. Did you play or did he play?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Well, I was a ball player. I don't know ...

Ralph Lean:

Aren't you too short to play basketball?

Jeffrey Orridge:

No, actually I had a pretty good basketball career, Ralph. I was five-eight but I could dunk. So I played throughout college and varsity as a freshman. I also ran track for the varsity as a freshman. I was an athlete. I played football through grade nine, until I never got that growth spurt that my parents promised me. I'm still waiting by, as a matter of fact. <y mother, who was, she was 90 at the time, a couple of years ago, and I asked her, "You know, mom, whatever happened?" She said, "You know son, you've never been patient enough, just wait. It's coming."

Anyway. I think just generally speaking, some people asked me, well, what's the role of a commissioner, and particularly at the CFL. I will say that I think it's evolved over time. I'd say, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, the role of a commissioner at any major sports league, but particularly the CFL, was to just make sure the game was played and to preserve the integrity of the game. So ... and that was kind of it. You know, I think nowadays we live in a much more litigious society so there are all kinds of legal issues that constantly arise, so legal background is I think very important and it can be invaluable at times. Just understanding the state of play and some of the nuances based on whatever possible conflicts arise where dispute resolution that needs to take place.

I think from a marketing standpoint we're always in an effort to get the most reach and be the most relevant sports property imaginable. You have to have a and marketing background and a marketing affinity.

Licensing also comes into play as well. Intellectual Property and understanding of intellectual property, contract negotiations, player relationships. We deal with a very strong union with the CFL PA.

So all of that background I think comes into place, and that's why I'm really fortunate to be in the position that I'm in and I'm able to capitalize on and utilize all those skill sets that I acquired not only through law school in terms of analytical thinking and problem solving, but real life experience in putting deals together, marketing, promoting, licensing, building brands, building businesses, and working with professional athletes. So it all came together for me in this job at the CFL that I've had for a little less than two years now.

Speaker 4:

What are your opinions on these illegal streaming sites and do you believe online broadcasting laws should be implemented? If so, what kind of new laws or policies should be implemented

Jeffrey Orridge:

Well, first of all, I'm a lawyer, so anything that is illegal, I certainly wouldn't condone. I think one of the challenges that we all have, especially nowadays with the advent of technology, is continuing to try to monetize whatever our product or property is. That's really important because it takes a significant amount of investment to create the product. You know, whether it's a sports property, you've got to pay players, you've got to launch the production of it, you've got to do promotion and marketing of it. All those are costs and you've got to be able to have a business model that will be able to recoup those costs and ideally provide you a profit margin.

I think with illegal streaming, where you're not able to monetize that or not able to capture revenue from that, it's just not good for ... it's not good for business, it's not good for the product and I think it's just unfair and that's why I think there are laws to prevent illegal streaming. In terms of what else we can do about that, I think once again, people often times, in addition to the law, they have to follow their conscience and what they think is fair and right. There's a reason why we have prohibition against illegal capturing of content.

Speaker 5:

Currently, your role within the CFL as commissioner has led to successes such as the sale of the Toronto Argonauts to Bell Canada, one of the biggest sponsorships deals in league history. With your levelheaded views of sports and business and your successes as being a leader within the industry, what is your take on female opportunity in sport? Does it bother you that females are objectified as merely fashion icons when interviewed pre or post game? Where do you stand on wage discrimination towards professional female athletes?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Wow. Really good questions. Anytime a there's a question on gender or visible minorities, I ... it's certainly a topic that's very close to home for me.

Ralph Lean:

The gender side?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Yeah, the gender side. Being being part of a marginalized, historically marginalized and disenfranchised group myself, I am particularly sensitive to the barriers that are created and some of the hurdles that we have to try to overcome based on institutionalization of those barriers and hurdles and the detours and the ceilings. People commonly refer to it as glass ceilings, although sometimes that glass is not as transparent as glass would seem to indicate.

I think the CFL, I'm very proud to be part of the CFL, particularly because we were the first professional sports league to have a black starting quarterback way back in 1951, Bernie Custis, who just unfortunately passed away at the age of 88 last week. But we started there. We had the first female general manager, I believe in all of sport, Joanne Pollock, in 1989 in Ottawa. We have now an assistant general manager, Catherine, right with the CFL. So I think the CFL has been particularly progressive. My senior vice president of content marketing is female, Christina Litz.

I think organizationally, we have been kind of on the edge or at least been relatively progressive in terms of our position for opportunities, offering opportunities for marginalized groups both gender wise and visible minorities. I think any inequality is a bad thing. I think that sport in general needs to do as much as it can to lower those barriers, to make opportunities more available, particularly in executive positions, particularly in decision making capacities. It's well known that people tend to hire the people that they are most comfortable with and I think if you have more women in hiring positions, in those decision making positions and have that capacity, that more women will actually be involved. Certainly, discrimination of any kind is abhorrent to me and I think we will need to continue to do more to make a level playing field, which is what sport should be.

Speaker 6:

My question is with regards to Canadian university sports. Canadian schools often compete against NCAA schools during the year and often beat these NCAA schools. In the case of Simon Fraser and UBC, those schools only compete in the NCAA yet their games and teams go unheard of. In your professional opinion, what needs to be done so that Canadian university sport championships reach audience levels similar to American NCAA championships?

Jeffrey Orridge:

One of the challenges that Canada has, and I don't see it changing anytime soon, is it is one-tenth the population of the US, and so where there are 340 million or 350 million Americans, there are only 34 million Canadians. The rise of high school and college sports in the US, the funding that it garners, the resources that are applied to it, I think are unprecedented around the world. There are all kinds of business economics around that as well that serves the US population in the way that media and multimedia is structured in the US, it allows for that. You know, you have the rise of regional sports networks, you have multimedia platforms which generate an incredible amount of revenue that the university system is able to be the beneficiary of and so they can reinvest in their programs in, in expanding their programs.

I think because of the economics of it, because of the structure of it, I think that the US is probably unique in terms of college sports and the ability to support college sports. Quite frankly, you know, the same paradigm and the same parameters just don't exist in Canada. Canadians, Canadian teams are definitely competitive when it comes to the playing field; I don't think that we could ever really rival the amount of exposure and resources that the US has.

Speaker 6:

Rogers' acquisition of broadcast rights to NHL games was subject to much scrutiny from the media. At the time, you were executive director at CBC sports and you were at the head of negotiations with the NHL. I was wondering if you could offer us some insight into what actually transpired during this negotiation process.

Jeffrey Orridge:

You know, people often ask me, they hold me responsible for losing the rights to Hockey Night In Canada. We actually, the CBC owns the brand Hockey Night In Canada. That's good. What we did was we lost the rights to broadcast live NHL games, which the NHL always had the rights to. We were basically leasing those rights for fee. When people ask me, you know, "Give me one good reason why you couldn't compete." I said, "I can give you 5.2 billion reasons why CBC couldn't compete." Rogers paid $5.2 billion for the rights, for the NHL rights. That's about $455 million a year, which is probably, it has been reported to be almost triple what the rights had been between both CBC and TSN in that last NHL deal. In comparison, the US is 10 times larger than Canada in terms of footprint.

NBC pays $200 million, Rogers pays $455 million. So you guys do the math. The interesting thing is that the NHL decided to go to a single gatekeeper model, so instead of bifurcating those rights and stratifying them where you had CBC as the free to air rights holder and you had TSN as the the cable distribution platform and then possibly there was a mix and a nonexclusive that they would have on digital broadcast, the NHL decided that they would best be served by going to one distributor who was vertically integrated, who had all those different access points and distribution channels.

Speaker 7:

As the 13th commissioner of the Canadian Football League, you have improved the sport and industry in various ways during your term. One of your accomplishments is implementing an enhanced, extensive, and transparent drug testing policy for the CFL players in 2016. The policy covers banned substances that are deemed to be performance enhancing drugs and notably excludes recreational drugs such as marijuana.

In contrast, marijuana is still a banned substance in the NFL and players are subjected to fines and suspensions based on that policy. Even the World Anti-doping Agency establishes marijuana and cannabinoids as substances that are prohibited in competition. So with Winnipeg Free Press exposing the league's long history of pot use, do you believe that the current policy protects the integrity of the game even when it doesn't prevent or combat the use of potential performance enhancing drugs such as marijuana?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Okay. The first thing is that I need to comment on is I'm not sure, I'm not familiar with the Winnipeg Free Press' article or investigative journalism on what you have described as a long standing history of pot use in the CFL.

Ralph Lean:

You're dealing with a Harvard lawyer, he's going to parse every word-

Jeffrey Orridge:

No, no, no, no. No, I just want to make sure that there isn't misinformation that continues to be promulgated, so I can't speak to that and I don't know about what they've done in what investigation and the levels of journalism. But I would like to dispel the insinuation that it is a problem among the CFL. I can't comment on other leagues, I don't know, but I have never ... I've been with the League a couple years now, that has not surfaced as a problem for us.

What had been a problem for us is the fact that the CCES, the Canadian Center on Ethics and Sport, and the WADO-accredited laboratory out of Montreal who services our drug testing program, didn't feel that our program was robust enough. They didn't feel that the sanctions were significant enough to deter performance enhancing drug use.

So I came onboard in 2015 and the third week I was in my chair, the lab decided that they were no longer going to test CFL athletes and they were no longer going to administer our program unless things changed. Fast forward, long story short, I had to work with the players' union to come to an agreement with them on how we would go forward. The issue was not, it was not an issue between, a confrontation between the players association and the League. It was how can we institute a drug testing program which was important and significant?

The bottom line is we worked with the lab, the Montreal-based lab, which is WADO-accredited; we worked with CCS; and we worked with the players' association to make sure we came up with a policy that was educational, that continued to raise awareness of the detrimental effects of performance enhancing drugs and also institute significant enough sanctions as to deter the potential use of performance enhancing drugs in our league.

For me, what was most important, probably, was not only preserving the integrity of the game and making sure that it was a level playing field, but also the message that it sent. It sent the message to young people that there are no shortcuts, that there are no ways to circumvent the system. You have to work hard, you have to sacrifice, you have to be in the best physical and mental condition you can possibly be to make this league. Just like there are no shortcuts in life, there are no shortcuts getting to the CFL. So that's really important because PEDs are so damaging to people's health and especially in young kids. So that was important.

We continue to work with CCES and the lab to make sure that we have the right standards and the right sanctions to not only deter but to assist and support. For example, in the previous drug testing policy before I came on board, the first infraction was a warning. Now we've changed that to it's an automatic two-game suspension. The second violation is a nine-game suspension, and the third violation is you are suspended for a calendar year. If you get busted for a fourth time, you're out of the league. So by creating that kind of, those kinds of penalties that hopefully deters the use of PEDs. How we decide on that list of PEDs? We work in concert with the WADO-accredited lab and CCES. So a recreational drug like marijuana is not part of the performance enhancing drug categories that that the CFL follows.

Speaker 8:

Through your experience with revising the CFL's drug policy while working with the CFLPA and the only lab in Canada authorized by the World Anti-Doping Agency, what barriers exist and what anti-doping efforts may be taken to prevent increased doping among athletes and institutional manipulation of the drug testing process and the Olympics?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Wow, that's a really weighty question. I think some of the things that we're doing, obviously, as you pointed out, we've increased the frequency of drug testing. We test the equivalent of every player. If you are found to have been in violation, in addition to the two-game suspension, there's mandatory testing for two years. That's also ideally serves as a chilling effect or an inhibitor or certainly a deterrent for for continued use. I think we continue to work with the labs, particularly the WADO-accredited lab, and follow their lead in terms of their latest testing, the technology and testing to try to make sure that it is as robust and as stringent as possible. We're not responsible for the detection methods, but you know, just like elusive measures are becoming much more sophisticated, testing measures are too. So I think we'll continue to promote the fact that there are penalties now if you break the rules and there are significant penalties.

If you think about it, if you're a professional athlete and your livelihood is dependent on playing, because if you don't play in the CFL, you don't get paid. And if you're suspended for half of the season or a year, that could be your career because there's somebody else who's stepping up to take your spot. Right? I think those kinds of deterrents are ... the rules that are in place and the penalties that are involved certainly serve to narrow that gap between people who were even considering cheating the system and those who actually do it.

Speaker 9:

Looking at other sports and the minimal Canadian teams that appear in national leagues, how do you think the CFL as well as other Canadian leagues and teams can grow and improve in popularity so that our citizens may have more pride in their country's athletics? Do you think an appearance of video games, as said in the Toronto Star article, may bring more attention to younger audiences?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Under my watch, there are three things that I'm focused on. Reach, relevance, and relationships, right? We have to broaden our reach that I spoke about before. We've got to be more relevant, which I'm going to get to in a second. And we need to deepen our relationships and it's deepening our relationships, not just with our avid fans, but that next generation of fans. We've made a concerted effort to go after that next generation of fans, which I'm talking about you guys.

Here's what we did. We have a deal with Draft Kings, which is a daily fantasy gaming product that originated in the States and they're the leader in this space. That will give us not only greater exposure here in Canada, but also help penetrate the US market because you can actually go on and play Daily Fantasy. We also have a Pick 'Em game, which is a lot simpler, where you can just choose whichever team you think is going to win at the end of the week. So we're into fantasy gaming.

Last year, actually last October, we just partnered with EA. So anybody play the Madden game, Madden football game? You're like, I don't know, tens of millions of people play that. So the CFL now is now embedded in the Madden game where if you get a certain number of points, you will get five ... you will have access to five CFL legends. People like Warren Moon and Doug Flutie and Joe Theismann. So the CFL now has a presence in a Madden game, which is the biggest video game out there.

We're doing much more on social media. We're creating our own content. We have our own podcast now called The Waggle. We've got show with Maxim Brody, which is kind of a lifestyle show focused on the CFL in social media, right? So we're focused on shareable content.

So we're doing video games, we're doing fantasy, we're utilizing the digital platform. Our social media, we've gone up 120% social media, 100% in our mobile app, we've gone up a hundred plus percent in traffic on our website. All this in the last year. Instagram is up 284%, Snapchat is up 87%, Facebook is up 34%, so all those platforms, we're ... Twitter, right, Twitter,

Ralph Lean:

There's only one I could do, they're telling me ... What were you telling me I had to do last ... was that Snapchat or something that I have to do?

Jeffrey Orridge:

That's right.

Ralph Lean:

I'll never [crosstalk]

Jeffrey Orridge:

So anyway, to your point, we are actually reaching out and promoting our product to that next generation of fans, which had been frankly underserved up until now. But you think about all those platforms and everything we're doing on social media, fantasy gaming, shareable content, creating our own content, that's where the future is, that's what I recognize, and that's what we're doing. We're having really good success so far.

Our penetration of our female demographic is up 7% or 8% in the last year. The 18 to 34 year old, that demo is up like 12%. We've made really good strides in a year, so I'm excited. I'm really excited about the future.

Speaker 9:

My question is, given your legal education and experience in the private sector, what kind of effect, if any, has your legal education had on your business career? How has your knowledge of the law assisted you in preparing sponsorship deals and contracts between the CFL and North American corporations?

Jeffrey Orridge:

Yeah, great question. I think my familiarity with contracts, having been a corporate lawyer, has been invaluable because there are nuances that you'll be able to discern when you look at deals and how to put deals together. I think the other aspect is, you know in law school, it just teaches you a certain way of thinking. A certain ... it hones your analytical skills. I think in any business relationship, you've got to analyze not only the content, but you've got to analyze the risks and the opportunities. So I think that that better prepares you for that.

I think that there's no substitute for experience also, and the fact that many deals are very similar in terms of format ... the content may be a little different, but in terms of format and key guiding principles ... and so you're already prepped for that so I think I've had a leg up on putting significant deals together based on my legal training, but also my legal experience.

Ralph Lean:

Yeah, you've seen today that game football league is in good hands with my friend Jeffrey. I urge you, after hearing him, to go to a game. Buy a ticket. Don't spend $1500 like I did, but go to a game.

Dr. Murphy:

Like Nobody's Business is a presentation of Toronto Metropolitan University's Ted Rogers School of Management. For more information about TRSM, visit ryerson.ca/tedrogersschool. I'm Dr. Steven Murphy. Thank you for listening.