CFL Announces Date for National Draft

The 2021 CFL National Draft will take place on May 4 starting at 8:30 p.m. NT, the league has announced.

The first two hours of the Draft will be broadcast on TSN and the rest can be followed along live on CFL.ca’s Draft Tracker.

Below are the changes along with the rationale for each one.

• The draft order will be determined by a random draw that is equally weighted across the nine CFL clubs. Teams traditionally pick eligible players in an order based on their records in the previous season, with the team with the worst record choosing first, barring trades, to encourage parity. The 2020 CFL Draft followed that traditional format. But the CFL is not staging a season in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• The 2021 CFL Draft will feature a “snake” format. That means that after teams pick in the first round, with the order determined by random draw, they will then pick in reverse order in the second round, and that pattern will continue. For example, the team that picks ninth in the first round will pick first in the second round.

• The 2021 CFL Draft will be six rounds long instead of the traditional eight rounds. This is in recognition of the fact that 2021 CFL training camps will feature a “double cohort” of Canadian rookies, with a group from each of the 2020 and 2021 CFL Drafts.

• There will be no territorial selections in the 2021 CFL Draft.