The Canadian Football League: 10 Claims to Fame

Yeah, some of the rules are different from the American version of gridiron football. Let’s start with the gridiron, which has an extra 10 yards between the goal lines and is 12 yards wider than U.S. fields. The offensive team only gets three downs (instead of four) to gain 10 yards, but the defense has to start off one yard behind the line of scrimmage. There are 12 players per side inside of 11, and 6 eligible receivers can run around pretty much wherever they want to behind the line of scrimmage before the ball is snapped.

Did I mention that the play clock is 20 seconds rather than 40 seconds as in the National Football League? Games go very quickly (lots of passing) and then really slowly: the game clock stops after every play in the final three minutes of the half. At one point in the 2012 season, 63 percent of games were settled in the final three minutes (“This one’s not over yet, Don”).

You’ve got to love the rouge. In addition to the extra 10 yards in the middle of the field, the CFL’s parking-lot-size end zones are 10 yards deeper than those in the U.S. If the team with the ball kicks it into the end zone as the result of an unsuccessful field goal attempt or a punt, the offense gets a point…unless the defense or receiving team can run the ball out of the end zone without being tackled, in which case the single point (a rouge) is taken off the board. A rouge is also scored if the kick goes through the end zone or lands in the end zone and then bounces out of bounds. You can imagine the implications for nail-biter games.

Arguably, Canadian football’s watershed moment came in May 1874, when a team from Montreal’s McGill University traveled to Massachusetts to play Harvard twice. The first game, won by Harvard 3–0, was played by soccerlike “Boston rules” that featured a round ball. The second game, a 0–0 tie, was played under McGill’s more-rugbylike rules, even though the Canadians’ spheroid ball had disappeared before the start of the game. The Harvard players liked the McGill rules better than their own, and thereafter U.S. football took the Canadian rules and literally ran with them toward the modern game. It took Canadian football longer to evolve away from its rugby roots.

Custom and geopolitical fact (a roughly 10:1 population advantage for the U.S. over Canada for most of the 20th–21st century) have resulted in a surfeit of talented American football players. According to a poll by Canadian television’s The Sports Network (TSN) in 2006, 39 out of the 50 greatest players in CFL history were Americans. But the CFL (whose marketing motto is “This is our league”) is fiercely determined to keep its Canadian character, and there have long been rules regarding the proportional presence of U.S. players on CFL teams. As of 2015, 20 of the 42 players on CFL rosters had to be Canadian or the progeny of Canadians. What’s more, 7 of 24 starters (remember 12 a side) had to be Canadian. And the CFL has had plenty of homegrown heroes—not least Hall of Famers Russ Jackson, Tony Gabriel, and Ray Elgaard.

In addition to American stars such as George Reed and Jackie Parker who spent their whole careers in Canada, more than a few U.S. players got their start in the CFL before going on to NFL stardom—among them Joe Kapp, Raghib (“Rocket”) Ismail, Jeff Garcia, and Joe Thiesmann. Most notably, in 1978, at a time when African Americans rarely were given a chance to quarterback NFL teams, Warren Moon went from the University of Washington to lead the Edmonton Eskimos to five consecutive Grey Cup wins before racking up nearly 50,000 yards passing in the NFL, mostly with the Houston Oilers and the Minnesota Vikings. Moon ended up in the pro football Hall of Fame in both countries and at number five on TSN’s list of all-time greatest CFL players.

Before Doug Flutie topped that TSN list, he struggled in his first stint in the NFL (1985–89). His rival as the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears, Jim McMahon, derisively nicknamed him “America’s Midget” (Flutie stood just under 5 feet 10 inches [1.78 metres] tall), but once Flutie got to Canada he stood very tall. In eight years in the CFL (with the British Columbia Lions, Calgary Stampeders, and Toronto Argonauts) Flutie won the league’s most-outstanding player award three times, was the Grey Cup MVP three times, and got to play with his brother Darren (who made the TSN list as a receiver).

For more than three decades the eight-or-nine-team CFL had two teams with essentially the same name: the Ottawa Rough Riders (two words) and the Saskatchewan Roughriders (one word), neither of which had anything to do with the Cuban exploits of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. The Ottawa team name honored the Ontario lumber industry’s logrollers, and the Saskatchewan version came about because the team shared its home base, Regina, Saskatchewan, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police training academy. That the two teams came into the CFL with the same name was reflective of the divide that had long existed between football in eastern and western Canada. When Ottawa got a new franchise in 2013 after the Rough Riders folded in 1996, Saskatchewan refused to share anymore, and the new Ottawa team took the name Redblacks.

Inclement weather (big surprise north of the 40th parallel in late autumn…) played the dominant role in a couple of the most-memorable Grey Cup games. In the 1962 game played between the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, fog engulfed the field at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto by the second half, obscuring the view of fans in the stands and those watching on TV. At the 5:31 mark of the fourth quarter, the players couldn’t see each other well enough to continue. The game was halted and finished the next day, with Winnipeg winning 28–27. In the 1977 game on a frozen field in Montreal, that city’s Alouettes gained traction and a competitive advantage over the Edmonton Eskimos after the Alouettes followed the lead of teammate Tony Proudfoot and fixed staples to bottom of their shoes, going on to win 41–6.

More than anything, what distinguishes the CFL from the NFL is what Canadian Geographic magazine characterized as the “quaint informality” of CFL games versus “flawless choreography on display” at NFL games. “The Canadian Football League is, at its heart, a small town,” Bruce Arthur wrote in Sports Illustrated in June 2014. The hype is less and the scale is more human. For one thing, CFL players make much less money than their NFL counterparts. More than a few CFL players even have off-season jobs. Workdays for NFL players generally last between 10 and 12 hours, but by rule CFL players can only be on the clock for four and a half hours. There are also smaller stadiums and smaller crowds. The financial health of the CFL has ebbed and flowed. When the CFL expanded unsuccessfully into the U.S. in the mid-1990s—with teams at one time or another in Baltimore, Birmingham, Las Vegas, Memphis, Sacramento, San Antonio, and Shreveport—it nearly bankrupted the league. But it bounced back. In the history of the league The Canadian Football League: The Phoenix of Professional Sports Leagues, Steve O’Brien recalled a statement by CFL Hall of Famer Annis Stukus: “The CFL’s been dying for thirty years—it’ll be dying thirty years from now.”