Dave’s Football Blog

For the first week of this new blog format, we’ll take a look at the six most popular football games on the planet, in no particular order but the one I choose, and give a brief overview of where they come from and where they might be going.

I know exactly what you’re thinking.

Why does Canadian football get its own post? Isn’t football in Canada, like everything else in Canada, pretty much the same as it is in America, but just different enough that it can call itself “Canadian?”

Perhaps. It takes a few minutes to get accustomed to the 12-on-12, 110-yard, three-down football they play in Canada, especially with all the pre-snap motion of the wide receivers and the end zones bigger than Jerry Jones’ ego. Ultimately, though, Canadian football and American football share a lot of similarities, and as a result, a lot of American players who can’t make the NFL end up in the CFL. Some would argue that this the reason Canada is one of the few countries on our lonely little planet where football is not the number one sport. I think it has more to do with all that ice, but that’s just me.

We should give a little credit to Canada, though, because Canadians had a much bigger influence on football in America than most people realize…

(More after the jump.)

It was a group of footballers from McGill University in Montreal that introduced rugby to the boys at Harvard University in 1874. Harvard was playing its own football game at the time, having practically isolated itself from the full-contact soccer riot that other schools were playing at the time, so when McGill challenged Harvard to a series of football matches, Harvard was all like, “Bring it, bitches!”

And bring it, they did — the “it” being rugby. McGill brought rugby to Harvard, which took rugby to other colleges, who eventually agreed on the gridiron variant we see today. So if you want to know why football in the U.S. is so different from the rest of the world… well, blame Canada. After all, if McGill doesn’t bring rugby to Harvard, who knows what American football looks like today? Maybe we just adopt Association Football at the turn of the 20th century and move on.

As the 20th century began, though, Canada began to adopt some of the ideas Walter Camp brought to the American game, thanks in part to Thrift Burnside, the captain of the University of Toronto football club. He created the Burnside Rules, which at the time was a radical departure from the traditional rugby union rules in Canada. The Burnside Rules ruled the number of players per team on the field from 15 to 12 and introduced the down-and-distance rules to the game. Burnside said from the start, though, that teams should have to gain ten yards on three downs. Camp’s original rule was five yards on three downs, and it didn’t become ten yards on four downs in America until 1912. Canada didn’t follow along on that one.

Other interesting things about Canadian football:

• They still called it the Canadian Rugby Football Union until about 1967, even though the Burnside Rules pretty much made the game… well, not rugby.
• The forward pass wasn’t widely adopted in Canada until about 1931. They already had the wider field Walter Camp originally wanted, so they didn’t really think they needed it at the time. Of course, they eventually realized the forward pass was awesome, and that was that.
• The CFL tried expanding into the U.S. in the mid-1990s. Like most attempts to create other football leagues in America, that didn’t work out so well.

The CFL is strictly Canadian now, and it has experienced a resurgence in popularity this decade. Average attendance for CFL games last season was just under 30,000 per game, and the Grey Cup Final in Winnipeg brought out 44,786 paying customers. It may be foolishness to suggest that football will ever replace hockey as the #1 sport in Canada, but hey, stranger things have happened.

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