Using control rig to animate the player

I have a player that has a control rig for simple IK. Now the control rig has a second function. The player is meant to hold a whip that I have generated from a spline, and I need to animate that spline. The current setup - having the same amount of controls in the rig as the spline, these controls follow the spline points that I then use to animate the spline and the hands.

So the current workflow is to place the CR and the Whip BP in the scene, the whip constantly follows the hand control location and then the rest of the CR controls follow the spline points. In the sequencer I make an animation by keyframing the control transforms.

Now when I replay the animation I was thinking that the CR controls would follow the animation keyframes but from what I can tell the control rig isn’t supposed to “exist” in run time. Or at least the CR doesn’t allow animation sequences to play so I have to disable it beforehand. Also it looks like the sequencer, when baking animations only exports the bone locations and doesn’t save the rig itself. Could I please have some insight as to how the CR works?