The Canadian Football League (CFL) announced a series of new rules in late September. Those changes are designed to make the game higher scoring and more entertaining.
But for many Canadian football fans, the rule changes have a political and national-identity dimension as well.
The CFL is the oldest, entirely-Canadian professional sports league in this country. It was founded in the 1950s.
Prior to that time, there were two Canadian pro football leagues, one for western and one for eastern Canada. Their top teams confronted each other annually for the Grey Cup.
The Grey Cup itself is quite a bit older than the CFL (and of the two leagues that merged to form it).
In 1909 then-Governor General Earl Grey donated the Grey Cup for the sport they then called rugby-football. A year later, in 1910, the Earl awarded the first Cup to an amateur Toronto team.
Baseball’s Blue Jays might be “Canada’s team,” and hockey might be this country’s de facto national sport.
But there is currently only one Canadian-born player on the Blue Jays’ active roster, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. And while Canadian players once dominated pro hockey, these days they are a minority on most NHL teams.
The CFL is the only major, professional men’s sports league in which a majority of the players, on all nine teams, must be Canadians.
(There was a brief period in the 1990s when the CFL expanded to the U.S., but that did last. In 1996, the CFL reverted to its all-Canadian format and has stayed that way ever since.)
Differences go beyond three vs. four downs
As this country’s football fans well know, the Canadian version of football is similar to the U.S. variety – but differs in some key respects.
The U.S. game has four downs. A team gets four chances to gain 10 yards and then start over with another first down.
In Canada, football only has three downs, which motivates teams to take risks and pass frequently.
Plus, in Canada, certain players, notably receivers, can start moving in the backfield before the ball is put into play, which makes the game less static and more dynamic than the U.S. version.
The Canadian field is wider and longer than the American. The U.S. field is 100 yards long and 53.3 yards wide. The Canadian, 110 yards long and 65 wide.
The U.S. end zone is 10 yards deep; the Canadian, 20.
Both countries’ games have multiple ways of scoring, the two most common being the three-point field goal and the six-point touchdown. Both also have the one and two-point conversions to touchdowns. However, the Canadian game also has a single-point score the U.S. lacks: the rouge.
The CFL’s new rules will reduce the Canadian game’s field length to the American standard: 100 yards.
They will also change the Canadian end zone, moving the goal posts from the front to the back (as they are in the U.S.) and reducing the total length from 20 to 15 years, which is still five more yards than the U.S. version.
The rouge will still exist in Canada, but the new rules will eliminate it in certain circumstances.
All in all, despite the changes, the Canadian game will still be markedly different from U.S. football.
Nonetheless, many diehard Canadian fans are not happy.
They see the new rules, especially the shorter field, as the thin edge of a wedge moving this country’s brand of football closer to that of the U.S.
Next, those Canadian fans say, we will get four downs and drop the single-point rouge altogether. They fear we are all at risk of losing a vital piece of Canadian identity, at a time when we should be affirming everything that makes Canada distinct.
And the naysayers might have a point.
However, if you want to know why the league thinks changes are necessary, have a look at the most recent Thanksgiving Day game between the Ottawa Redblacks and the Montreal Alouettes.
Too many field goals, not enough touchdowns
Most of the scoring plays in that game consisted of 3-point field goals, earned by kicking the ball through the goal posts. The sport’s premier and most exciting play, the 6-point touchdown, was in short supply.
Each team only scored one offensive touchdown. (The Alouette’s defence also scored a touchdown on a blocked Ottawa kick.)
That sort of result has been all-too-common of late in the CFL. The league has suffered from a worrisome dearth of the kind of drama that pleases fans and fills stadiums, the drama of the touchdown.
Recently-appointed CFL Commissioner Stewart Johnston claims his new rules will result in 60 more touchdowns per season, making for a more entertaining game, bringing more fans onboard.
The shorter field should, of course, make it easier to score those exciting six-pointers.
As well, by moving the goal posts back, and thus adding 15 yards to the needed length for a field goal, teams will have a harder time scoring the Canadian game’s low-hanging-fruit: the 3-point kick. The league hopes teams will, as a result, take more risks on offence.
But neither the league nor the Canadian sports nationalists are proposing the big change that would make the game both more high-scoring, and ergo crowd-pleasing, and, at the same time, decidedly different from the U.S. variety.
Currently, the CFL’s biggest headache is not the too-frequent occurrence of low-scoring, boring games. It is the virtual plague of serious injuries.
Weekly, each CFL team reports which players are sidelined with injuries. This week, for instance, Saskatchewan reports 15 injured warriors, including their starting quarterback. That frighteningly high number has been all too common this season.
The most vexatious and consequential injuries are those to CFL quarterbacks. In the Canadian league the first-string quarterback is almost always the highest-paid, marquee player.
For one stretch of the 2025 football season, Montreal had to play their fourth-string quarterback. That happened because not only their star, starting-quarterback, but two other, higher-ranked replacements, were all suffering serious injuries.
The Alouettes, naturally, lost a crucial series of games.
On October 4, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats handily defeated the Toronto Argonauts, 47 to 29. Sports reporters were effusive in their praise of the tough Hamilton defence, which nullified the Toronto passing game.
There’s another, less glorious, side to that story, though.
Early in the October 4 game, a Hamilton defender, in an entirely legal move, executed a ferocious tackle on the talented and nimble Toronto quarterback, Nick Arbuckle. That knocked Arbuckle out of the game (and the rest of the season) with a shoulder injury.
In large measure, the Tiger-Cats’ victory could be attributed to their targeting and sidelining Toronto’s most important player, which hardly seems sportsmanlike or fair. The Canadian pro sport world, however, shrugs it off, and takes such injuries as merely part of the game.
If sports fans and analysts don’t give much of a hoot, the kind of gladiatorial spectacle we witnessed in Hamilton’s ill-gotten victory over Toronto should give the CFL’s leadership serious pause.
For starters, making it acceptable to win by deliberately injuring opposing players is a cruel way to conduct a business, any business, even a pro-sports business.
But all those injuries to star players also have a negative impact on the quality of play. They drive away fans and cost the league and its teams money.
You’d think that if player safety did not count much for team owners and league management, the teams’ bottom lines would.
And so, while the league has rule changes on the agenda, here’s a big one the CFL management and team owners should add to their list.
New rule to protect CFL’s marquee players from serious injuries
The CFL should make it illegal to tackle a quarterback behind the line of scrimmage.
If the quarterback decides to run, and crosses the line, he’s fair game. But standing behind the offensive line quarterbacks should be off bounds.
The opposing team’s defenders could harass the quarterback and try to knock down the ball. But they should not be allowed to drag him to the ground and risk injuring him.
Such a rule change would result in an entirely different game, one with a lot more completed passes, and many more offensive touchdowns.
And even the current rules, in both the U.S. and Canada, make it a penalty to rough the passer. That means making contact with the quarterback after he has thrown the ball.
The roughing the passer penalty came about to prevent injury to quarterbacks. This new rule change would merely extend that protection.
Even if it is a sound idea, in the U.S., where blood and guts sell tickets, they are highly unlikely to ever contemplate such a change.
And so, if the CFL were to adopt this modification to the rules, the Canadian game would become truly unique.
The CFL could market its product as a game more focused on skill, speed and strategy than on brute force. Such a pitch would likely attract fans who are now turned off by the excessively violent nature of the game.
Naturally, a major reform in the rules such as this would have reverberating impacts on the way Canadian football is played and structured.
There would likely be fewer players on the defensive and offensive lines, and more receivers and pass defenders.
It would also probably be necessary to limit the amount of time a quarterback could stand behind the line and hang onto the ball. Canadian football would need some quarterback timing mechanism similar to the shot clock in basketball or the pitch clock in baseball.
The happy result of this revolutionary rule change would be fewer catastrophic injuries to quarterbacks, and, likely to other players as well. It would also make for higher scoring, more fast-paced games.
Canadian fans already think their game is, at least potentially, more wide-open and unpredictable than the U.S. version.
This rule change could turn that potentiality into reality.
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