By Brian Boone

If you’re missing high level gridiron football and just can’t wait until August for the NFL and college football seasons to get underway, might be suggested a northern alternative: The Canadian Football League is about ready to field its 68^thseason. 

The Origins

By the 1920s, both British-style rugby and American-style football were being contested at Canadian colleges, until they merged into a third rough and tumble sport: Canadian football. It combined the speed and kick-dominant play of rugby with much of the structure and rules of American football. It took off quickly and was soon played at every level, from youth to high school to professional to senior. Two inaugural members of the Canadian Football League, established in 1958, were already about 90 years old — the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers used to be rugby teams.

The Rules

At first glance or upon a casual viewing, a Canadian football game looks much like an NFL game, but there are sizeable differences. The field is 110 yards long and 65 feet wide, versus the NFL’s playing surface of 100 x 53 yards. The goalposts are placed on the goal line, too, as opposed to the back of the end zone in the states. CFL teams get one extra player than NFL teams do, one more backfielder. The games are speedier, too, on account of how the offense gets just three downs instead of four. One other big difference comes in scoring, in the form of the rogue point. If the kicking team misses a field goal or it goes out of bounds, the other team gets a plus-one.

The Expansion

In the early 1990s, the CFL was making so much money in Canada (it’s historically the second-most watched sport on TV there, behind hockey), that it expanded into the U.S., placing teams in cities that loved football but didn’t have an NFL team, including Sacramento, Birmingham, Memphis, and Las Vegas. The Baltimore Stallions even won the CFL championship, the Grey Cup, in 1995. But poor attendance and no American TV contract led to such a financial loss that just after that title game, the CFL pulled out of the U.S. 

The Greats

Some well-known NFL players who also defected to the CFL for a while include quarterbacks Joe Theismann, Warren Moon, and Doug Flutie, voted the league’s best player ever in 2006. But the best Canadian football player — or pro football player ever for that matter — might be Damon Allen. His 84,301 total passing and rushing yards is more than anyone else ever amassed in the CFL or the NFL. He won the Grey Cup four times with three different teams, was named the title game’s MVP three times, and secured the regular season MVP title in 2005 at the age of 42. Probably the best defensive player to ever suit up in the CFL was American lineman John Barrow, who played 14 seasons (1957–1970) for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. He was a six-time all-star, a four-time Grey Cup winner, and upon retirement, went on to manage the Toronto Argonauts.