The Calgary Stampeders won the Grey Cup yesterday. That’s about all I can tell you about that, as I was too depressed to watch any more football after seeing the Carolina Panthers stink up the join in Atlanta. (Moron that later.)

The Columbus Crew beat the New York Red Bulls, 3-1, to win the double. Click here for video highlights. The Red Bulls still have as many MLS Cups as the Carolina Railhawks. Ha ha.

The Arizona Cardinals attempted a free kick field goal yesterday. Apparently, Donovan McNabb’s lack of awareness about tie games in the NFL made everyone rule book anoraks last week.

British police seem to have it in for Stoke City fans. Perhaps they’re scared that everyone from Stoke can throw projectiles with the scary accuracy of Rory Delap.

Cesc Fabregas is the new captain of Arsenal. They’re saved!

NCAA Division II power West Texas A&M scored more points than Oklahoma on Saturday — and lost by 25. Yikes and away!

That seems pretty likely. The Canadian dollar, which was equal to the U.S. dollar not too long ago, has been losing a fair amount of value lately, and that affects how much Saputo and George Gillett, the Montreal Canadiens owner who’s having his own financial troubles at Liverpool, will end up spending on the expansion fee.

I wonder, though, if something else is afoot here. After all, the Impact beat Toronto FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps to win the Voyagers Cup, and they made it through to the knockout stage of the CONCACAF Champions League. Perhaps Saputo decided that this was slightly more awesome than spending almost CAD$51 million (as of today) to join a league that would cap its salary and force it to care less about the continental championship. Why not be free to spend as much as you make on players that can beat TFC every year?

Either way, this is a win for USL, as this move will keep one of its best clubs in the fold. That leaves Atlanta, Miami, Ottowa, Portland, St. Louis and Vancouver up for two MLS expansion franchises in 2011. What I want to know is this — if Portland or Vancouver make the cut, but not both, does that doom the USL franchise that doesn’t move to MLS? The Timbers seem like they could sell enough tickets to afford the travel and survive the relative isolation they have from other USL-1 clubs, but what about the Whitecaps?

UPDATE: This report emerged today:

Following MLS Commissioner Don Garber’s statements regarding Montreal’s bid, the Montreal partnership group would like to bring one important rectification: Montreal did not withdraw its bid from Major League Soccer but was informed that the league did not retain its bid.

Out of respect for the Grey Cup festivities, the partnership group will not make any additional statements over the weekend.

The Montreal Alouettes face the Calgary Stampeders in the Grey Cup Final tomorrow in Montreal. So it looks like we’ll have to wait until next week before this story gets really fun…

Tell me those guys wouldn’t get Pacmanned on general principle. Seriously, CFL, the Red Patch Boys run circles around you.

(Spotted on Larry Brown Sports.)

Remember when Andre Rison wanted to put that “Bad Moon Rison” nickname behind him and wanted to be known as Spiderman? Well, Toronto Argonauts receiver Arland Bruce III decided to take a step further — by actually donning a Spidey mask after scoring a touchdown.

And it only took him, what, five minutes or so to get the mask out of his uniform and put it on? Smooth. And so worth a 15-yard penalty. Dork. No wonder you’re in Canada.

(Spotted on Deadspin.)

Canada is more than happy to participate in just about every major American sports league there is. Baseball? Sure, come on up to Toronto. Basketball? No problem. We’re happy to launch the Raptors and Grizzlies north of the border. Soccer? Hey, we’d love to have Toronto FC in MLS. Look at our crazy fans! Let’s do this in Montreal, too! We love this stuff!

But when the NFL starts making a move into Canada, suddenly, those American interlopers are trying to destroy our Canadian culture! Newspapers are up in arms! Politicians cry out that we must look out for the good for the country! PR people are producing videos like this:

Yeah! This is our league! Keep your league out of our borders, you 100-yard heathens!

You know what? I don’t see you Canadians rushing to pull all your hockey teams out of the NHL and forming your own uniquely Canadian hockey league. I don’t see you trying to build on the success of Toronto FC, the Montreal Impact and the Vancouver Whitecaps and building your own uniquely Canadian soccer league. All you have is a tri-cities championship and an association that can’t pull its head out of its arse. You’re not rushing to kick the Raptors out of Toronto, either, are you?

But no, 3-down, 110-yard football is such a vital part of your heritage, isn’t it? What would we ever do without the Grey Cup?

You’d watch the NFL, that’s what. It’s the same reason so many soccer fans who enjoy the Premier League and EURO 2008 can’t seem to get into MLS games. People want to see the best players play at the highest level, and for the gridiron game, those players aren’t in Canada. They’re in the NFL. That’s why CFL expansion into America failed in the 1990s. We don’t want minor league football in this country, and that’s what most people think the CFL is. The best CFL players almost always move south to the NFL. Most of those players played college football in the USA, anyway. It’s not like they’re switching from rugby union to rugby league or something.

Hey, here’s an idea — why don’t you dump all those Burnside Rules and go back to playing rugby union? That was your gift to America back in 1874, wasn’t it? Then Thrift Burnside came along and took some ideas from Walter Camp, and 100 years later, it constitutes Canadian culture. How fitting.

Here’s another idea — if you’re so worried about the survival of the CFL, Canada, why don’t you go round up some mounties and have them surround the Rogers Centre so that the Buffalo Bills won’t be able to get inside to play there? It won’t happen, Canada, and you know why? Canadian fans want to see the best football players in the world, too. Plus, you’re too chickenshit to build your own national leagues in other major sports. If an NFL team in Toronto destroys the CFL, then maybe the CFL isn’t good enough to stand on its own, eh?

Here’s the $78 million question, though — if Toronto falls in love with the Bills, will they abandon the Argonauts and send the Canadian Football League crashing down?

CFL commissioner Mark Cohon has already said publicly that an NFL team in Toronto would be the death knell for his 3-down, 110-yard football league. Said Cohon:

“I want to see Toronto as a prospering (CFL) franchise, which sets the bellwether for the rest of the league. I was not hired to be commissioner of a Western league.

“If you make the assumption that an NFL team would come into this market, it would cut into (the CFL’s) ad revenue, ticketing and would remove our ability to compete, as there’s a limited number of sponsorship and television money in the Canadian marketplace.”

Perhaps the real question is how important Toronto is to the CFL. If the Argos give way to the Bills, would the Hamilton Tiger-Cats fan base fall apart well? Would Montreal be too cut off from the rest of the league to allow the Alouettes to survive? Or is Cohon just being a Cassandra?

It makes sense for Toronto — a big city with a sports-crazy fan base that already has teams in the NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS — to try and lure the Bills away from Buffalo. Perhaps sports fans in Toronto think the CFL is a too much of a minor league compared to the NFL, and “Canadian-ness” might not be as important as having the best quality sports in that city.

So is this deal really the beginning of the end of the CFL? Could Canadian football survive the stampede of the Bills? Or will 3-down football up north become a relic of the 20th century?

Only in the gridiron game do players celebrate scores by spiking the football. This may be why. Ouch!

(Spotted on Deadspin.)

So I think I’ve finally woken from my tryptophan coma this weekend, and I now find myself sitting in Champps — because the Steelers don’t play until tomorrow night, of course — waiting for a full afternoon of NFL games. (I haven’t posted to this blog from my Treo in a while, so hopefully, the formatting isn’t goofy.)

I would be remiss, though, if I failed to mention that the 95th edition of the CFL’s championship game, the Grey Cup Final, kicks off tonight at 5:30 PM in Toronto. Either the Winnipeg Blue Bombers or the Saskatchewan Rough Riders will walk away with the coveted Canadian gridiron trophy.

If you’re in America, it should be on one of the regional sports channels that you can get over satellite — probably Altitude Sports. If you don’t have satellite TV, it should be shown in one of your local sports bars. I recommend calling ahead.

Enjoy these Grey Cup Finals while you can folks. If the NFL gets its dirty little claws into Toronto, we may not get to the 100th Grey Cup — even if some Canadians think the NFL sucks.

Seriously, there are eight teams in the CFL, and six of them make the playoffs. The Montreal Alouettes are in with a record of 8-10, while the Calgary Stampeders are 7-10-1. They both have playoff games on Sunday. Montreal is 0-3 against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, while Calgary is 1-3 against the Saskatchewan Rough Riders. Division winners Toronto and B.C. await the winners of these games.

The Grey Cup awaits in Toronto on November 25, as does lovely Courtney, who was recently named Miss Argo 2007. Unlike Nelly Furtado last year, Courtney won’t be freezing her ass off outside. The Final is at the Rogers Centre this year.

UPDATE: Courtesy of Deadspin, here’s a slightly more thorough preview of the CFL playoffs from Food Court Lunch.

You can probably guess why I’m asking this question, but if not, here’s a hint:

Seriously, wasn’t this guy competing in a Wii Bowling tournament last week?

In an article in the Winnipeg Sun, B.C. Lions President Bob Ackles believes that the future of the CFL is at stake if an NFL team moves to Toronto.

“No question in my mind a team could be successful in Toronto,” Ackles told Sun Media. “But it would take southern Ontario and immediately kill Toronto and Hamilton and therefore it would kill the Grey Cup and the CFL. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

Translation: those imperialist bastards could trample something that’s uniquely Canadian, and we value our Canadian-ness. (Keep in mind that one of the MVP trophies handed out at the Grey Cup is for Most Valuable Canadian.)

This is clearly an attempt by Ackles to help boost his country’s national identity, though I have to wonder how much identity you can put into a 3-down, 110-yard variation on a game played by your neighbors to the south. The differences between American and Canadian football aren’t quite as severe as the differences between, say, rugby union and rugby league. Wouldn’t it be better for the gridiron game to unify under one code, even if it involved adding some Canadian elements to the American game? (The wider field and more liberal pre-snap motion rules come to mind.)

And where does all this expansion talk come from, anyway? The NFL is evenly aligned right now, and adding only one expansion team would ruin the format. If the NFL were to expand, it would literally have to expand by four teams — two in the AFC, two in the NFC — to remain even, and then it would have to realign each conference into three divisions of six teams, which might ruin a lot of current division rivalries and make a 16-game schedule a bit trickier to pull off.

That alone will keep the NFL out of Toronto for a while. I’m a little surprised anyone is bringing this up now, out of the clear blue nowhere. After all, if the Canadians stuck to playing rugby union, rather than letting ol’ Thrift Burnside change the rules to create a gridiron game, this wouldn’t even be an issue, would it?

(Spotted on FanHouse. Represent!)

Still, this made me smile just a little.

Montreal running back Jarrett Payton is the CFL’s offensive player of the week after leading the Alouettes to a 30-18 win over the Calgary Stampeders in just his third game in the league.

Payton rushed for 160 yards and a touchdown on 20 carries last week. His performance included a 35-yard run in the second quarter that was capped by an eight-yard score.

It’s impossible to root against Jarrett Payton, whose father was truly one of the all-time greats and was taken from us far too soon because of liver problems. Walter’s son showed flashes of his father while he was at the University of Miami, and many sports fans were hoping that Jarrett would find a spot on an NFL roster one day, but he was cut by the Tennessee Titans in 2006 after being way down on the depth chart for them in 2005.

So far, Jarrett’s biggest football accomplishment was leading the Amsterdam Admirals to a World Bowl title in the now defunct NFL Europe. A small part of me hopes he can lead Montreal to a Grey Cup, and that he scores the touchdown in that game that his dad never got to score in Super Bowl XX.

Good on ya, Jarrett. I know you’re trying to live up to an impossible legacy, but we’re rooting for you just the same.

(Spotted on FanHouse.)

With all this stuff going on, it’s impossible for me to get to everything — unless I quit my job and write for AOL full time, but that’s not happening just yet. In the meantime, here’s some fun stuff from around the webtertubes…

• Premier League predictions in haiku form. (Odds and Sods)
• Premier League predictions in scantily-clad form. (The Offside)
• But is the Prem eating itself? (Twohundredpercent)
• CFL players hit a little close to home. (Deadspin)
• They play footy in Laos? Really? (World Footy News)
• Argentine barra bravas are turning on each other. (Pitch Invasion)
• Brazilian football sparks homophobia. (William K. Wolfrum)
• German football fans, however, have their priorities straight. (We Are the Postmen)
• The NFL upgrades instant replay to HD. About damn time. (Sports Illustrated)
• Why is Steve Largent railing against Google? (Ars Technica)
• Most expensive football road trip ever. (FanHouse)
• “It was almost better when he was sitting.” (Washington Post)
• For one yokozuna, a life without football is not worth living. (Das FanHaus)
• Carlito sings! (Who Ate All the Pies)

I’m going to gorge on more types of football this weekend than you could possibly imagine, and it all starts tomorrow morning with the first Premier League match — Sunderland v. Tottenham Hotspur at 7:45 AM on Setanta. Granted, I’ll probably be watching all these games on DVR delay, including the Hawthorn v. Brisbane game that starts at midnight Eastern Time, but I’ll be watching.

Whatever your football, enjoy the games tomorrow.

Toronto Argonauts running back Dominique Dorsey tied a Canadian Football League record by returning a missed field goal 129 yards for a touchdown in the fourth quarter of Thursday’s 29-27 overtime loss to the Montreal Alouettes.

Dorsey tied the record held by teammate Bashir Levingston, who set the mark on June 28 in a 24-22 win over the B.C. Lions.

Naturally, Toronto lost the game after a 22-yard field goal by Ben Cahoon, a slotback who served as the backup to the backup placekicker, who was ejected for “objectionable conduct.” The only objectionable conduct I’ve seen from a kicker was Bill Gramatica’s celebratory leap that resulted in a torn ACL.

Actually, that’s not true. Anyone named Gramatica and Sauerbrun tends to be quite objectionable in general…

Then there’s Canada, which, as Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow informs us, is is celebrating Canada Day, that glorious northern holiday that commemorates the forming of the Canadian Confederation 140 years ago today. The CFL is still the top domestic football league in Canada, and average attendance in this week’s season-opening CFL games was 27,875. Only Molson Stadium in Montreal managed to attract a mere 20,202 for the Alouettes-Roughriders game, and many attributed that to heavy rains in the forecast. (UPDATE: Someone in the comments informed me that Molson Stadium only seats 20,202, so the game was actually a sellout.)

But was it the rain? Or were Canadians more focused on another football code?

The folks at Pitch Invasion took a closer look at how big soccer is getting in the Great White North, noting that the FIFA Under-20 World Cup is nearly sold out. Nearly 60,000 people filled Olympic Stadium in Montreal to watch Poland’s 1-0 upset of Brazil. How many of those people chose soccer over the CFL this weekend?

Likewise, the Skydom… er, Rogers Centre was hardly filled to capacity for the B.C. Lions-Toronto Argonauts match on Friday — to the CFL’s credit, nearly 30,000 people attended the game — but Toronto F.C., which plays at the 20,000-seat BMO Field, has sold out their season tickets and have 3,000 people on a waiting list.

It’s not just T.F.C. that Canadian fans are supporting, though. 12,844 fans went to the Claude-Robillard Sports Complex in Montreal on Friday night to watch a USL First Division match between the Montreal Impact and the Puerto Rico Islanders. Likewise, the Vancouver Whitecaps average attendance has been 5,098, and Swangard Stadium only holds 5,722.

Keep in mind that USL is a step below MLS on the North American football ladder, and the quality of football is probably equivalent to Football League One, which is England’s third division. Yet the fans in Montreal and Vancouver support their clubs nearly as much as the fans in Toronto.

This begs the question — how long will it be before these Canadian clubs decide to break away from American leagues and form their own Canadian league? After all, Canada did get to the semifinals of the Gold Cup and might have upset the USA side were it not for a questionable offside flag. The fan base in Canada seems much more ready to embrace this football code than the USA, and not only is the fan base for soccer growing in Canada, but so is the quality of play. The Whitecaps and Impact are both in the Top 3 of the USL First Division, and while Toronto F.C. is still an expansion team, its future looks promising.

Yes, they would still need five other clubs to form the soccer equivalent of the CFL, but the country sure looks like it could support that within ten years, doesn’t it?

We all agree on the basic laws of the Association football game. Interpretations vary from nation to nation, but for the most part, it’s the same game wherever you go, which has helped make it the world’s most popular football code.

But we can’t agree on one set of laws for rugby football, can we? It’s bad enough that the game was split in the nation where it was born, but then it evolved into something completely different in North America. There’s no way to put this game back together again in such a way that the whole world can play by one set of rules, is there?

Oh, sure, you can change the rules that are out there now. Rugby unions around the world are now testing out a series of Experimental Law Variations, or ELVs, that are speeding up the game and garnering rave reviews from players and fans alike. They won’t be in place in time for the 2007 Rugby World Cup, but they might prove to make the game more interesting by the time the next World Cup rolls around in 2011.

Meanwhile, rugby league pundits are suggesting that the current game has gotten stale, and perhaps some rules changes are required to make things more interesting. Rugby league has its own World Cup in 2008, and whether anything in the game changes between now and then remains to be seen.

What would really help rugby is for these unions and leagues to get everyone together and agree on one set of rules by which everyone can play — rugby reunification, if you will. This century-old split in the code may be the only thing that’s preventing rugby from becoming as popular around the world as, say, soccer or basketball. If everyone could get on the same page, maybe rugby football could become as big as Association football, rather than akin to HD-DVD v. Blu-ray.

Alas, this may just be wishful thinking. We humans are a tribal sort, and there’s always that us v. them mentality lurking about — our club is better than your club, our football game is better than your football game, and so on. This is why the NFL and AFL will always have uphill battles when trying to spread their games to other countries. The rest of the world just doesn’t play football like that.

Canadians aren’t just crazy about their association football. They love their 110-yard gridiron, too, and with the Canadian Football League season starting tomorrow night, the good folks at The Boatmen Blog and Sports Grumblings have their team previews ready for all to peruse.

There are reports that Eric Crouch, Akili Smith and Shaun King are all challenging for starting QB jobs in the CFL. Wasn’t Shaun King a bust in Arena Football recently? When I become famous, I want his agent.

I won’t go into the whole reason why Canadians only have three downs instead of four — mostly because I already explained that here — but I will mention that a couple of recognizable names will be wearing Canadian uniforms this season. Former Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch is in camp in Toronto, though he’s still behind septuagenarian Damon Allen on the depth chart, and Anthony Dorsett Jr., defensive back and son of the Dallas Cowboys great, is also on the Argo’s roster.

Know what’s most shocking about that last story? Tony Dorsett’s son is 33 years old. I’m not that much older, but hearing that sure made me feel ancient…

I’ll try to find a decent CFL preview here before the season kicks off. I wonder how attendance for the Argos’ opener will compare to attendance for Toronto F.C., which has seen packed houses and flying seat cushions as of late.

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.

Get the latest CFL odds at the Internet’s most trusted sportsbook.