Friday Morning Football: Football Variations - CFL

There are a number of people out there who only follow one kind of football. There are people who only watch the NFL or who only watch NCAA football. Then, even further, many of those fans don't even think that the Canadian version of football or the Arena version are real football.

Me? Well, I love it all. I am a fan of all versions of football and I love to play, coach, watch, keep up with, and collect stuff from all football leagues. So, I thought I might spend the next few blogs discussing what I like about each of the different levels and variations of football. I am doing this in no particular order so I am going to start with our neighbors to the North; the Canadian Football League (CFL). (www.cfl.ca)

In the CFL there are a number of obvious differences. Let's start with the field. It is 110 yards in length with the 55 yard line being midfield. The field is 65 yards in width and the end zones are 20 yards deep. In addition, the field goal posts are at the front of the end zone. In other words, it is a much larger field than a standard 11-man football field.

The larger size of the field is taken advantage of in Canadian football because they play with 12 players on the field for each team. Both the American and Canadian versions of the game require the same number of players at the line of scrimmage at the snap, so in the Canadian version the 12th player is a skill player on offense and a secondary/safety type player on defense.

The scoring in Canadian football is also different and while I am not going to go into all the ways you can score, I will mention that touchdowns are still 6pts with a PAT it becomes 7. However, in Canadian football you can still score a single point on certain types of plays and the kicking game is far more involved in the scoring and the game in general. One other thing is that in the Canadian game you have 3 downs to advance 10 yards while in the American game it is 4 downs.

The history of how the Canadian game developed and the changes made in the American game derived from a home and home set of games between McGill University and Harvard in 1874 is fascinating. Each version of the game was significantly impacted by this interesting 2 game series where it was decided to play half of each game with the other teams rules.

There are many other subtle and not so subtle differences between the games, but I enjoy the larger field and more players on the field. You would think that with the larger field and more space to work with Canadian games would be overly high scoring, however, the lack of a 4th down is definitely an equalizer in that regard. You can catch CFL football on tv on occasion here in the US. When I was in college, I played at the University of Puget Sound and we played a Canadian college in Simon Fraser University which was in British Columbia. The fascinating thing is that Simon Fraser would play 11-man American football against us (and a few other US universities) and the next week play 12-man Canadian football against other Canadian universities the next week. There is so much more that could be discussed about Canadian football but I simply don't have the time. If you haven't ever watched a game, I suggest you check it out, eh. You can see their website here: www.cfl.ca