CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston announced the league’s rule changes during a press conference in Toronto last Monday.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Mark Carney has lately taken to framing this country’s political calendar in terms of its football schedule – promising, repeatedly, that the next in a promised series of nation-building projects will be announced before the Grey Cup.
Exactly how many Canadians know that date (Nov. 16, for the record) off the top of their heads is debatable.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister seems to be leaning into the Canadian Football League as one of this country’s much-needed, all-too-rare cultural differentiators – which is more than can be said, right now, for the people running it.
If ever there were a year for the CFL to play up its Canadian-ness, this would have been it. Amid a wave of patriotic fervour in response to Donald Trump’s bellicosity, it seemed a no-brainer to pour every available marketing dollar into making the case for itself as a worthy but distinctive alternative to the National Football League, which some Canadians might no longer cross the border to watch live or stomach when broadcast in its jingoistic glory.
Instead, the CFL’s leadership spent the season’s first three months conducting business as usual. And then, this week, commissioner Stewart Johnson – five months into the job – convened a news conference to abruptly announce a package of changes to the on-field product that have been almost universally interpreted as making it more like the NFL.
Set aside the effect of each individual tweak – shortening the heretofore long Canadian field, moving the goalposts to the back of the end zone, nearly ending the quirky single-point ’rouge,’ changing the timekeeping in a way that could make for fewer of the CFL’s signature wild finishes.
Each can be debated on its own merits, and they’re not all as bad as this week’s freakout among traditionalist fans would suggest.
But the real cause for alarm was how they were packaged together. The rollout was so sudden and shoddy that the CFL immediately found itself under public attack from one of its marquee players, B.C. Lions quarterback Nathan Rourke. Leaders of amateur football leagues that play under CFL rules seemed similarly blindsided.
B.C. Lions quarterback Nathan Rourke was one of the more vocal critics of the new CFL rules, labelling them as ‘garbage.’Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
It all sent a sorry signal about the starting premise for Johnson, and the nine CFL governors who unanimously approved the changes, in trying to grow the game.
There are ways that serious sports leagues go about modernizing themselves. They send out trial balloons; build the case with reams of data; test out changes in minor-league affiliates or preseason games; avoid doing too much at once. (Major League Baseball’s incremental shift toward robo-umpires is a case in point.) While trying to capture 21st-century attention spans, they’re hyperconscious of not losing what took generations to build.
The cavalier way that Johnson dropped his bombshell – including an initial refusal to set fans’ minds at ease by ruling out a subsequent shift from three to four downs – instead suggested a league that feels it has little to lose.
If so, he and the governors have their reasons, enumerated this week by defenders of the changes. Yes, the majority of the league’s nine teams are not currently profitable; Toronto remains a particular challenge; TV ratings aren’t what they once were, though that’s hardly unique; the fan base is notoriously aging.
But consider the CFL in the broader cultural context, and it becomes obvious we have very much to lose indeed.
There are so few Canadian entertainment products with mass appeal, as any consumers who’ve actively tried to shift habits this year can attest. It’s relatively easy to stop buying U.S. vegetables, or replace bourbon with Canadian whisky; much harder is finding something not American – let alone Canadian – to stream after a long day.
That goes for sports nearly as much as movies or TV dramas. Among major North American leagues, the least identifiably American is the NHL – and it’s headquartered in New York, 32 years and counting since a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
An actual Canadian entity with the CFL’s reach is, for all its foibles, a unicorn.
The CFL is one of the few Canadian entertainment products with mass appeal.Heywood Yu/The Canadian Press
For anyone starting a new Canadian league in any major professional sport – and plenty have tried – it would be beyond their wildest dreams for average attendance to exceed 20,000 fans per game. Or for its championship to draw millions of viewers each year, while bringing together thousands of Albertans and Saskatchewanians and Ontarians and Quebeckers for a nearly week-long party in the host city. Or to be the second-best pro league in that sport, worldwide.
Part of that is legacy, dating back to before the NFL existed in current form. Part is circumstance, being the one sport in which a U.S.-headquartered league doesn’t have any Canadian teams.
Part of it is because, while there’s not enough money to compete with the U.S. for talent, the style of play brings out the best in some elite athletes less suited to the NFL, and to some eyes makes for a more entertaining product.
That last front is where the most tangible damage from this week’s announcement could be – though there’s still the chance for some walking back, via the sort of nuance that should have been provided if the league had been more diligent in the first place.
Take the move to change the play clock (the time that the offensive team has to snap the ball). It’s currently 20 seconds and starts at the referees’ discretion, which can be clunky, justifying the announced move to a more NFL-like 35 seconds once the previous play ends. The catch is that, as announced, an extra 15 seconds could run off the clock between plays late in games – helping teams with the lead boringly kill the clock late, as they do in the NFL, and making for fewer comebacks. The fix, so obvious that it’s weird it wasn’t included initially, would be for the game clock to still only start when the play clock hits 20 seconds, in games’ final minutes.
Or take the rouge. It currently stipulates that a team gets a single point if it kicks the ball into the end zone and the ball isn’t returned out of it, including if the ball goes straight through the end zone. The league is trying to get rid of that last part, largely for fear of tied games being decided by unplayable punts or missed field goals. But as announced there will also be no rouge if a kick lands in the end zone and bounces out, which if not corrected will lead to fewer exciting kick returns – another CFL calling card – and more standing around as teams wait for ball to go out of play.
The rouge, where CFL teams score a point by kicking the ball into the end zone and the other team being unable to return it, is one of the uniquely Canadian things that sets the CFL apart from the NFL.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
If this sort of stuff is a little in the weeds for casual fans, even Canadians who barely watch football at all could draw lessons from this episode – and not just about the importance of nailing down details before getting behind a microphone.
There’s more reason than ever to explore how to strengthen every institution in this country; to not be complacent. (In the CFL’s case, there’s actually more to be done on how it runs itself off the field – from better advertising, to finding ways to keep marketable players from constantly switching teams.)
But the leaders of those institutions can’t pursue change in ways that give the impression of an inferiority complex.
They have to bring along people who are rightfully proud of what we have, while growing the audience in ways that don’t reek of desperation.
And they have to show, much more than the CFL did this week, that they take their covenant with the country seriously. Because if they don’t, who will?