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 1950's , 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 .

HISTORY

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 Hamilton--the Tigers and the Wildcats--merged 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, adding the Sacramento Gold Miners in an attempt to broaden Canadian football's popular appeal and boost league revenues. 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 saw three more American CFL teams as part of a plan that would see the CFL expand to 20 teams, ten in Canada and ten in the United States. The Baltimore CFL Colts , a name that tried to evoke the spirit of a National Football League team that had since moved to Indianapolis (and were forced to change their name to the Stallions after a long legal battle) were 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). On the other side of the equation were the Las Vegas Posse , who were so unsuccessful due to fan apathy that their final home game had to be moved to Edmonton . The Shreveport Pirates were the other new team.

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. However, fan interest in Canadian football, with the possible exception of the Stallions (largely because the Stallions were a top team), was sparse at best, with fans being driven away to see American college football or the NFL late in the season. 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, and owner Jim Speros could not see the Stallions remaining there for long. The Texans would later fold with a similar explanation.

Teams were also considered for Orlando and Miami. The Miami group, wanted to call their team the Manatees and hosted an exhibition game between Memphis and Baltimore at the Orange Bowl. Attendance was poor and no serious offer for a franchise was ever made. An Orlando group paid a $250,000 US downpayment on a franchise but again it never came to reality.

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.. After Ford Field was opened in Detroit, there was a small amount of talk about using the NFL Detroit Lions ' former home, the Pontiac Silverdome , for a CFL team. Detroit, Michigan is right next to Windsor, Ontario , and this franchise could possibly have been referred to as the CFL franchise from Windsor, or a joint Detroit/Windsor franchise, but would play in Detroit.

Popularity

Although Ice Hockey is currently Canada's most popular sport, the CFL is highly popular in Quebec and west of Ontario , and its franchises there 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 Edmonton Eskimos regularly boast the league's highest average attendance, drawing about 40,000 people per game (although only two other stadiums have the capacity for 40,000+ people). 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.

CFL-VERSUS-NFL COMPARISONS

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.

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 that 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 Americans. {Link without Title}

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.

FORMAT

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. {Link without Title}

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 ).

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.

TEAMS