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Canadian Football League

Canadian Football LeagueCurrent season or competition:
2011 CFL season

Sport Canadian football
Founded January 17, 1958
Motto This Is Our League

Notre Ligue. Notre Football.
Inaugural season 1958
No. of teams 8, in two four-team divisions
Country(ies) Canada
Most recent champion(s) BC Lions
Most titles Toronto Argonauts 15 (total)
Edmonton Eskimos 10 (modern era)
TV partner(s) TSN, RDS, NFL Network
Official website cfl.ca

The Canadian Football League or CFL (Ligue canadienne de football [LCF] in French) is a professional sports league located in Canada. The CFL is the highest level of competition in Canadian football, a form of gridiron football closely related to American football.

Its eight teams, which are located in eight cities, are divided into two divisions of four teams each—the East Division and the West Division. The league’s 19-week regular season runs from late June to early November; each team plays 18 games with one bye week. Following the regular season, the three teams with the best records in their division (except if the fourth place team in one division has a better record than the third place team in the other division, the team with the better record makes the playoffs and “crosses over” to the other division’s playoff) will compete in the league’s three-week divisional playoffs, which culminate in the late-November Grey Cup championship, the country’s largest annual sports and television event.[2]

The CFL was officially founded in 1958. It is the highest level of play in Canadian football, the most popular football league in Canada, and the second-most popular major sports league in Canada, after the National Hockey League.[3] Although ice hockey is Canada’s most popular sport, the CFL has increased the popularity of Canadian football in Quebec and Western Canada.[3] Canadian football is also played at amateur levels (i.e. youth, high school, CJFL, QJFL, CIS and senior leagues such as the Alberta Football League).

The 2010s will be a significant decade for the CFL in terms of growth, as teams have renovated, expanded stadiums, or plan to build entirely new stadiums. The Montreal Alouettes accomplished this first, adding 5,000 seats to Percival Molson Memorial Stadium in time for the 2010 CFL season.[4] The Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders also renovated their respective stadia and facilities for the 2010 season.[5] During the following season the BC Lions will play under a new, retractable roof in BC Place after spending one year at Empire Field.[6] Then, the following year, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers will play in an entirely new stadium at the University of Manitoba, scheduled to open in time for the 2012 CFL season.[7] The Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Saskatchewan Roughriders and the new Ottawa franchise will also be looking at new or extensively-renovated stadiums in the following years.[8][9][10]

History

Early history

Rugby football began to be played in Canada in the 1860s, and many of the first Canadian football teams played under the auspices of the Canadian Rugby Football Union (CRFU), founded in 1884.[11] The CRFU was reorganized as the Canadian Rugby Union (CRU) in 1892, and served as an umbrella organization that several leagues were part of. The Grey Cup was donated by Governor General Earl Grey in 1909 to the team winning the Senior Amateur Football Championship of Canada. By that time, the sport as played in Canada had diverged markedly from its rugby origins. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the two senior leagues of the CRU, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (IRFU) and Western Interprovincial Football Union (WIFU) gradually evolved from amateur to professional leagues, and amateur teams such as those in the Ontario Rugby Football Union (ORFU) were no longer competitive in their Cup challenges. The ORFU withdrew from Grey Cup competition in 1954, heralding the start of the modern era of professional Canadian football, in which the Grey Cup has been exclusively contested by professional teams (Since 1965, Canada’s top amateur teams, competing in Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS), have competed for the Vanier Cup).

In 1956, the IRFU and WIFU formed a new umbrella organization, the Canadian Football Council (CFC), and in 1958, the CFC left the CRU, becoming the Canadian Football League (The CRU remained the governing body for amateur play in Canada, eventually adopting the name Football Canada). Initially, there was no inter-divisional play between eastern (IRFU) and western (WIFU) 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 per season. The separate histories of the IRFU and the WIFU accounted for the fact that two teams had basically the same name: the IRFU’s Ottawa Rough Riders were often called the “Eastern Riders”, while the WIFU’s Saskatchewan Roughriders were called the “Western Riders” or “Green Riders”. Other team names had unusual yet traditional origins: with rowing a national craze in the late 19th century, the Argonaut Rowing Club of Toronto formed a rugby team for its members’ off-season participation; the club name Toronto Argonauts remains to this day, and after World War II, the two teams in Hamilton—the Tigers and the Flying Wildcats—merged both their organizations and their names, forming the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

After the admission of the expansion BC Lions in Vancouver in 1954, the league remained stable with nine franchises: (BC Lions, Calgary Stampeders, Edmonton Eskimos, Saskatchewan Roughriders, Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Toronto Argonauts, Ottawa Rough Riders, Montreal Alouettes) from its 1958 inception until 1982, when the Alouettes folded and were 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 three teams in the East Division compared to five teams in the West Division, forced the League to alter its playoff structure by moving the easternmost Western team, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, into the East Division, upsetting the long-standing tradition of “East vs. West”, as Winnipeg is not considered part of eastern Canada.

United States expansion

The CFL began eyeing an American expansion in 1992. In 1993, the league admitted its first United States-based franchise, the Sacramento Gold Miners. After modest success, the league then expanded further in the U.S. in 1994 with the Las Vegas Posse, Baltimore Stallions, and Shreveport Pirates. The Las Vegas franchise was unsuccessful and turned into a road team by the end of the season. Baltimore, however, advanced all the way to the 82nd Grey Cup and was a financial success as well.

For the 1995 campaign, the American teams were split off into their own South Division. Las Vegas folded, while two new teams, the Birmingham Barracudas and Memphis Mad Dogs, were added. The Sacramento team moved to become the San Antonio Texans A San Antonio team was to have been admitted into the CFL along with the Gold Miners for 1993 but folded before taking a single snap. 1995 saw the Stallions become the first non-Canadian team to win the Grey Cup.

The success of the CFL’s U.S. expansion was mixed. Baltimore and San Antonio had sustainable operations and were expected to return in 1996. Memphis and Birmingham had reasonable success in 1995 but ran into severe attendance problems during college football season; Shreveport, although it had solid attendance, did not fare well on the field and suffered from poor management. By the end of the 1995 season, Shreveport and Birmingham moved out of their cities and ultimately folded, and Memphis followed suit. When Art Modell, owner of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, announced he would be moving his team to Baltimore to become the Baltimore Ravens, the Stallions moved to Montreal, becoming the revived Montreal Alouettes. San Antonio decided not to continue operations as the only American team and folded shortly thereafter. By the 1996 season, the Canadian Football League was once again based entirely in Canada.

Recent history

After three seasons that included American teams, the CFL American expansion experiment came to a close, as the CFL returned to an all-Canadian format in 1996 with nine teams; however, the Ottawa Rough Riders, in existence since 1876, folded after the 1996 season, due to poor ownership and fan support, in addition to an aging facility which no longer was suitable for providing a profitable location for professional football. In 2002, the league expanded back to nine teams with the creation of the Ottawa Renegades. After four seasons of financial losses, the Renegades were suspended indefinitely before the 2006 season; their players were absorbed by the remaining teams in a dispersal draft.

In 1997, the NFL provided a $3-million USD interest-free loan to the financially struggling CFL, as CFL teams were losing money after the failed US expansion. In return, the NFL was granted access to CFL players entering a defined two-month window in the option year of their contract. This was later written into the CFL’s collective bargaining agreement with its players. The CFL’s finances have since stabilized and they eventually repaid the loan. The CFL–NFL agreement expired in 2006. Both leagues have been attempting to reach a new agreement, however the CFL broke off negotiations after Canadian telecommunications firm Rogers Communications paid $78 million to host eight games of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills in Toronto over five seasons.[12][13]

The league had struck a committee in 2003 to examine the feasibility of adding a tenth team (which has been a long-standing CFL ambition), the leading candidate cities were Quebec City and Halifax.[14] Exhibition games were held in Quebec City in 2003[15] and in Halifax in 2005. The Halifax event, dubbed Touchdown Atlantic, was scheduled to repeat in 2006 but was cancelled after the suspension of the Ottawa Renegades franchise.[16] Commissioner Tom Wright at that time had indicated that Halifax was the leading candidate for expansion.[17] Moncton is also pursuing a CFL team and has now replaced Halifax as the leading expansion candidate.[18] A newly constructed stadium for the World Junior Track and Field Championships, which opened in 2010, would need the seating and field itself expanded for a CFL team.[19] The mayor of Moncton, premier of New Brunswick, and league commissioner Mark Cohon met in February 2009 to negotiate a deal that would see the city host a regular season game annually over five years, beginning in the 2010 CFL season.[20]