This has been one of those weeks that reminds you how passionately people from across this land care for the great game of Canadian football, whether they want to see it evolve or stay just the same as it’s always been.

And there have been lots of folks on both sides of that fence since Canadian Football League commissioner Stewart Johnston’s Monday unveiling of changes to the league’s field dimensions, end zones, location of goalposts and play clock.

It was news that seemed to come out of nowhere, but by the end of Monday Johnston had garnered everyone’s attention with his bold announcement. It also fueled speculation – both optimistic and fearful – about what else he might do with the CFL.

“This isn’t the last announcement,” Johnston said on Overdrive this week. “We’re looking at taking this league to another level.”

It has been no secret that Johnston was hired by the CFL’s board of governors this spring with a mandate for change.

And in delivering such significant changes within his first six months he’s also set himself apart from his predecessors.

CFL commissioners normally spend the time between their hiring and first Grey Cup orienting themselves and refining their plans, a reasonable course of action since the CFL traditionally hires commissioners from outside its sphere.

But as a former president of TSN, the league’s biggest partner, Johnston had a bird’s-eye view of the CFL operation and arrived this spring with a to-do list well established in his mind.

He promised change and he’s already delivered, starting with the on-field product.

The objective is to create a more entertaining game by incentivizing touchdowns over field goals and removing some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the game that didn’t pass the logic test – like goalposts in the field of play and allowing teams to win a game on a missed field goal.

The latter of those has been criticized and debated for decades, and has long been a punchline to those outside the sport.

While the changes to the game have been broadly accepted among players and football staff across the league’s nine teams, there have been exceptions, most notably BC Lions quarterback Nathan Rourke, the league’s highest-paid player and the biggest Canadian football star north of the border.

Rourke became the patron saint of the CFL never-change nationalist crowd on Monday when he called the changes “garbage,” decried what he sees as a move towards the NFL game, and questioned the commissioner’s love of football.

That same sentiment is easy to find on social media, where angry fans picked up on Rourke’s criticism about changes being enacted without consultation from the league’s players, coaches or general managers.

And just how that happened is a fair question since the CFL has a rules committee – comprised mostly of GMs and head coaches.

But the rules committee is a place where consensus on simple matters can be very difficult and often impossible to achieve. And in truth, it’s more set up to monitor the game on a year-to-year basis than it is to oversee a redesign of the playing field.

In short, it’s a recipe for guaranteed gridlock and maintaining the status quo, the very thing the governors told Johnston they didn’t want.

So, Johnston developed his plan primarily within the league office and then took it directly to the people who had hired him with a mandate for change. They backed him unanimously.

That kind of brazen lightning-fast change and authority in the hands of the commissioner represents a gigantic cultural shift for a league often criticized for refusing to grant the person in its highest office the power to effectively do the job.

At least in these early days, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Johnston.

Part of that no doubt comes from his familiarity with the board and overall league operations from his first day on the job.

Johnston is the rare commissioner hired from within the CFL’s own business environment, meaning he’s not in need of the same learning curve other commissioners have required. In the past, that learning curve is where mistakes have been made and credibility lost.

Johnston was able to go directly to the doing, far more quickly than anyone imagined.

In doing so he’s set an early tone for his leadership being the most aggressive we’ve seen from a CFL commissioner, perhaps ever.

That’s exactly what the people who hired him wanted.

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