Canadian Football League
 |
Canadian Football League |
The
Canadian Football League (
CFL), also known by its French name,
Ligue canadienne de football (LCF), is a professional league located entirely in
Canada that plays
Canadian football. It is considered to be the highest level of play in Canadian football. The league's top trophy, the
Grey Cup, was donated by
Governor General Earl Grey in
1909 to the team winning the
Senior Amateur Football Championship of Canada. Both the trophy and the championship game have become known as the
Grey Cup. Since
1954, when the
Ontario Rugby Football Union stopped challenging for the Grey Cup, the trophy has been awarded only to
professional teams with the championship generally being an
East vs.
West competition. This is also the year the
British Columbia Lions started play as the ninth professional team, so although the CFL was not technically founded until the late
1950s, 1954 is often referred to as the start of the "modern era" of Canadian professional football. It is also considered to be the year the CFL was founded in substance if not in name. The game is similar to
American football but there are
several major rule differences.
Early history
The first Canadian football teams played under the auspices of the
Canadian Rugby Football Union (CRFU), founded in
1884. However this union quickly folded and was reorganized as the
Canadian Rugby Union in 1892. The CRU was an
umbrella organization that several leagues were part of. From the
1930s to the
1950s the two senior leagues of the CRU (the
Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the
Western Interprovincial Football Union) gradually evolved from amateur to professional leagues. They found they had less and less in common with the amateur leagues and consequently in
1956 formed a new umbrella organization, called the
Canadian Football Council. And in
1958 it left the CRU altogether and was renamed the Canadian Football League. Initially, there was no interdivisional play between eastern and western teams except at the
Grey Cup final. Limited interlocking play was introduced in
1961 and by
1981 there was a full interlocking schedule of 16 games a season.
The separate histories of the IRFU and the WIFU accounted for the fact that 2 teams had basically the same nickname. To tell the 2 apart, the IRFU's Ottawa Rough Riders (always 2 separate words) were often called the "Eastern Riders," while the WIFU's Saskatchewan Roughriders (always one word) were called the "Western Riders."
Other team nicknames had unusual yet traditional origins. With rowing a national craze in the late 1800's, the Argonaut Rowing Club of Toronto formed a rugby team for its members' off-season participation, and the Club nickname remains with the team. After World War II, the 2 teams in Hamiltonmerged both their organizations and their nicknames, thus accounting for the hyphen in "Tiger-Cats."
After the admission of the expansion British Columbia Lions in 1954, the league remained stable with nine franchises from its 1958 inception until
1982 when the
Montreal Alouettes folded and were subsequently replaced the same year by a new franchise named the
Concordes. In
1986 the
Concordes were renamed the Alouettes to attract more fan support, but the team folded the next year. The demise of the Alouettes, leaving only 3 teams in the Eastern Division compared to 5 teams in the Western Division, forced the League to balance its playoff structure by moving the 'easternmost' Western team, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, into the East--achieving balance, but upsetting the long-standing tradition of 'East vs. West,' as Winnipeg isn't seen as part of eastern Canada.
Attempts at expansion into the United States
Main article: CFL USA
In
1993 the league admitted its first U.S. franchise, the
Sacramento Gold Miners, in an attempt to broaden Canadian football's popular appeal and boost league revenues. The ultimate plan was to have a league of 10 Canadian and 10 American teams. Spearheading the efforts were two former
World League of American Football owners,
Fred Anderson and
Larry J. Benson, who would each receive a franchise. While Benson's team, the
San Antonio Texans, would not play a single down, the Gold Miners would see action, finishing a respectable 6-12 (but remaining at the bottom of the West Division). The following year would see more expansion: the
Las Vegas Posse, the
San Antonio Texans, and the
Baltimore CFL Colts (who were forced to change their name to the Stallions after a long legal battle). Baltimore was the most successful of any American CFL team, having finished second in the East and making it to the Grey Cup Finals (becoming the first American team to play for the Grey Cup).
The 1995 season saw the loss of the Posse and the move of the Gold Miners to San Antonio, while the
Birmingham Barracudas and
Memphis Mad Dogs were added (Teams were also considered for Orlando and Miami). However, fan interest in Canadian football, with the possible exception of the Stallions, was sparse at best. At the end of the year, which saw the Stallions become the first American team to win the Grey Cup, all but the Stallions and the
San Antonio Texans folded due to financial difficulties. The Stallions would later move to Montreal (renamed the Alouettes) when the NFL announced that
a new team was to be added in Baltimore. The Texans would later fold with a similar explanation.
Recent history
After three seasons of American teams, the CFL returned to an all-Canadian format in
1996 with nine teams; however, the
Ottawa Rough Riders folded following the season. In
2002 the league expanded back to nine teams with the
Ottawa Renegades, which were suspended for the
2006 season after sustaining millions of dollars in losses in their four seasons.
Popularity
Although
ice hockey is currently Canada's most popular sport, the CFL is highly popular in Quebec and west of
Ontario, and western franchises generally enjoy a greater level of support than Ontario teams. However, since the
2004 season, both Toronto and Hamilton have seen a resurgence in attendance, with Toronto drawing upwards of 32,000 people a game. The
BC Lions franchise has also seen a recent resurgence of fan support, going from 14,000 people per game to over 30,000 in just a couple of years, which many attribute to proper on-field and off-field management. The
Edmonton Eskimos regularly boast the league's highest average attendance, drawing around 40,000 people per game (Vancouver's
BC Place Stadium, Edmonton's
Commonwealth Stadium, and Toronto's
Rogers Centre being the only stadiums that seat 40,000+). Football has been gaining in popularity in Quebec with the recent success of the Alouettes, and Quebec university football teams now lead the country in attendance and on the field, with Laval University, the University of Montreal and Concordia University consistently in the top ten in the country. In Southern Ontario, the CFL is now recovering from the
bankruptcy that plagued the Toronto and Hamilton teams in the 2003 season. Both teams have improved their attendance figures dramatically since the 2003 season. Before the Ottawa Renegades' suspension, the league was looking to add a tenth team in
Atlantic Canada or
Quebec City, although the current mayor of Quebec City
Andrée Boucher is against using city money to build a CFL stadium. Quebec City and
Halifax have recently hosted CFL exhibition games, both of which sold out quickly.
Halifax was to host another exhibition game in 2006. That game was cancelled because of the suspension of the Renegades, as Ottawa was scheduled to play in the exhibition. Moncton, NB is also being looked at as a possible expansion city.
A recent survey conducted at the
University of Lethbridge confirmed that the CFL is the second most popular league in Canada, with the following of 19% of the total adult Canadian population compared to 30% for the NHL. The NFL had 13% following, with a total of 24% following at least one of the pro football leagues. This could be interpreted to mean that approximately 80% of Canadian football fans follow the CFL and about 55% follow the NFL. [
1]
In 2005, the league set an all-time attendance record with a total attendance of more than 2.3 million. [
2]
In the days when sports teams were financed almost entirely by ticket sales the CFL and NFL were, financially speaking, on relatively equal footing and the CFL could sign top U.S.
college football stars such as
Johnny Rodgers and
Joe Theismann. In fact, during the
1950s and
1960s exhibition games were played between CFL and NFL/AFL teams using a mixture of rules. The last such exhibition game saw the CFL's Hamilton Tiger-Cats defeat the AFL's Buffalo Bills, the only time in which a Canadian team defeated an American team in those series.
As late as the
1970s and early
1980s when high-capacity stadiums were built in
Montreal,
Edmonton and
Vancouver and
Toronto's stadium was expanded, people such as
Montreal Alouettes owner
Nelson Skalbania continued to believe that relative parity could be sustained so long as the CFL could get larger stadiums built in its other cities and sell them out. But by the 1980s it became clear that financial parity between the two leagues was not going to be maintained - not so much because of the disparity in attendance figures as due to the NFL's increasingly lucrative television contracts that now bring in a majority of the NFL's revenue. Because the U.S. television market is nearly ten times the size of that of Canada, the CFL could not hope to negotiate similar contracts with Canadian networks.
The CFL currently limits each team to 20 "imports," (i.e. players who have received training in gridiron football outside of Canada). In practice, nearly all of the CFL's "imports" are from the
United States. [
3]
Although the difference in average salaries is currently great, with only a handful of CFL players making above the NFL minimum, the differences in the rules between the two leagues means that different kinds of players tend to excel at each game. The result of this is that to a significant extent the leagues are not in competition for the same kinds of players.
League training camps open in May, with regular season games beginning by late June and finishing by early November. The 9-team season format had each team playing 18 games over this 20 week span, thus giving each team at least 2
bye weeks, while one team played 2 games in one week at some point during the schedule due to the odd number of teams. With short notice after the suspension of Ottawa, the CFL is maintaining the 18 game/20 week schedule by playing eight three-game weekends during the 2006 season, thus giving two teams a bye. Teams are divided into 2 divisions, with 4 teams in each division, the
East and the
West. Each team plays one home game and one away game against each team in the opposing division, three games (2 home/1 road or 1 home/2 road) against two division rivals, and a double home-and-home (four games) against one division rival. For 2006, the double home-and-home pairings are B.C./Saskatchewan, Calgary/Edmonton, Montreal/Winnipeg, and Toronto/Hamilton.
The principal television broadcaster is
TSN, with some games also shown on
CBC and
RDS within Canada, and a variety of regional networks in the U.S. Games are typically scheduled for Thursday to Saturday evenings during June, July and August, but switch to more Saturday and Sunday afternoon games during September and October. TSN has also created a tradition of at least one Friday night game each week. In 2006
Sirius Satellite Radio Canada gained exclusive rights for North American CFL satellite radio broadcasts and will broadcast 25 CFL games including the Grey Cup through 2008.[
4]
In the United States, CFL games are broadcast on the
America One Television Network. America One feeds the broadcasts mainly to regional cable outlets, such as
NESN.
Another fixture in the CFL season is the
Labour Day Classic, played over the course of the
Labour Day weekend (typically Week 10 in the regular season), where the matchups for three of the games in the week (Toronto at Hamilton, Edmonton at Calgary, and Winnipeg at Saskatchewan) have always remained the same year after year. The week after also sees matchups that remain the same between years (most notably the Calgary-Edmonton rematch at
Commonwealth Stadium, and the
Banjo Bowl, a rematch of the Saskatchewan-Winnipeg game played at
Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg).
A lesser known fixture in the CFL season is the
Thanksgiving Day Classic, played over Thanksgiving Day (Canada's Thanksgiving Day is the same date as the USA's Columbus Day). Unlike the Labour Day games, however, the matchups are not always the same each year.
The playoffs begin in November. After the regular season, the top team from each division has an automatic berth to the Division Finals, and the second place team has an automatic berth in the Division Semifinals. The third place team from each division will face the second place team, unless the fourth place team from the opposite division finishes with a better record (this provision is known as the
crossover rule). The two division champions then face each other in the
Grey Cup, which is held on the 3rd or 4th Sunday of November.
Although the crossover rule implies that it is possible for two teams in the same division to play for the Grey Cup, no team that has crossed over has gone past the Division Semifinals.
*
Ottawa Renegades (currently suspended for the 2006 season, although the team could re-launch in a future season)Defunct teams
*
Atlantic Schooners never played a game
*
Birmingham Barracudas*
Las Vegas Posse*
Memphis Mad Dogs*
Montreal Concordes*
Ottawa Rough Riders*
San Antonio Texans *
Sacramento Gold Miners*
Shreveport Pirates#
G. Sydney Halter (
1958-
1966)#
Keith Davey (
1966)#
Ted Workman (
1967)
(interim)#
Allan McEachern (
1967-
1968)#
Jake G. Gaudaur (
1968-
1984)#
Douglas H. Mitchell (
1984-
1988)#
C. William Baker (
1989)#
R. Roy McMurty (
1990)
(interim)#
J. Donald Crump (
1990-
1991)#
Phil Kershaw (
1992)
(interim)#
Larry W. Smith (
1992-
1996)#
John H. Tory (
1996-
2000)#
Michael R. Lysko (
2000-
2002)#
David Braley (
2002)
(interim)#
Tom E.S. Wright (
2003-present) (Resigning as commissioner at the end of this year.)
*
List of Canadian Football League stadiums*
Canadian Football Hall of Fame*
Canadian football*
Comparison of Canadian and American football*
List of CFL seasons*
Sports league attendances*
Canadian Football League*
Canadian Rules - a CFL Blog*
13thman.com*
TheCFLForum.com*
55 Yard Line*
CFLFan.com*
CFL Historical*
CFL vs.NFL: Head to Head Game History*
A CFL wiki encyclopedia*
Canadian Football News & Results*
Soudog's CFL History Fan Site
