Canada
The Canadian Football League (CFL)
BC vs Edmonton LIVE
Match scheduled:
Date: 05-07-2010
Time 01:00 until :04:00
Week 1 - Canadian Football League CFL
Watch live CFL TV
The Canadian Football League or CFL (Ligue canadienne de football [LCF] in French) is a professional sports league located in Canada. The CFL is the highest level of competition in Canadian football, a form of Gridiron football.
Its eight teams, which are located in eight cities, are divided into two Conferences of four teams each—East and West. The league's 19-week regular season runs from late June to late November; each team plays 18 games with one bye week. Following the regular season, the six teams with the best records (regardless of Conference) compete in the league's three-week playoffs, which culminate in the late-November Grey Cup championship, the country's largest annual sports and television event.[1]
The CFL was officially founded in 1958. It is the highest level of play in Canadian football, the most popular football league in Canada, and the most popular major sports league in Canada after the National Hockey League.[2]
Although ice hockey is Canada's most popular sport, the CFL has increased the popularity of Canadian football in Quebec and Western Canada.[2] Canadian football is also played at amateur levels (i.e. youth, high school, CJFL, QJFL, CIS and senior leagues such as the Alberta Football League).
In Southern Ontario, the CFL is recovering from the bankruptcy that plagued the Toronto and Hamilton teams in the 2003 season. Having come under new ownership, both teams have improved their attendance figures dramatically since then.[3]
The 2010s will be a significant decade for the CFL in terms of growth, as many teams will see renovated, expanded or entirely new stadiums come to fruition. The Montreal Alouettes will experience this first, with 5000 seats being added to Percival Molson Memorial Stadium in time for the 2010 CFL season.[4] The Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders will also have their stadiums and facilities renovated in time for the 2010 season.[5] The following season will see the BC Lions play under a new, retractable roof in BC Place Stadium after spending one year at Empire Field.[6] Then, after another season, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers will play in an entirely new stadium at the University of Manitoba, set to open in time for the 2012 CFL season. [7] The Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Saskatchewan Roughriders and the new Ottawa franchise will also be looking at new or extensively renovated stadiums in the following years.[8][9][10]
In 1956, the IRFU and WIFU formed a new umbrella organization, the Canadian Football Council (CFC), and in 1958, the CFC left the CRU, becoming the Canadian Football League (The CRU remained the governing body for amateur play in Canada, eventually adopting the name Football Canada). Initially, there was no inter-divisional play between eastern (IRFU) and western (WIFU) teams except at the Grey Cup final. Limited interlocking play was introduced in 1961 and by 1981 there was a full interlocking schedule of 16 games per season. The separate histories of the IRFU and the WIFU accounted for the fact that two teams had basically the same name: the IRFU's Ottawa Rough Riders were often called the "Eastern Riders", while the WIFU's Saskatchewan Roughriders were called the "Western Riders" or "Green Riders". Other team names had unusual yet traditional origins: with rowing a national craze in the late 1800s, the Argonaut Rowing Club of Toronto formed a rugby team for its members' off-season participation; the club name Toronto Argonauts remains to this day, and after World War II, the two teams in Hamilton—the Tigers and the Flying Wildcats—merged both their organizations and their names, forming the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
After the admission of the expansion BC Lions in Vancouver in 1954, the league remained stable with nine franchises: (BC Lions, Calgary Stampeders, Edmonton Eskimos, Saskatchewan Roughriders, Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Toronto Argonauts, Ottawa Rough Riders, Montreal Alouettes) from its 1958 inception until 1982, when the Alouettes folded and were replaced the same year by a new franchise named the Concordes.
In 1986 the Concordes were renamed the Alouettes to attract more fan support, but the team folded the next year. The demise of the Alouettes, leaving only three teams in the East Division compared to five teams in the West Division, forced the League to alter its playoff structure by moving the easternmost Western team, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, into the East Division, upsetting the long-standing tradition of "East vs. West", as Winnipeg is not considered part of eastern Canada.
[edit] United States expansion
The CFL began eyeing an American expansion in 1992. In 1993, the league admitted its first United States-based franchise, the Sacramento Gold Miners. After modest success, the league then expanded further in the U.S. in 1994 with the Las Vegas Posse, Baltimore Stallions, and Shreveport Pirates. The Las Vegas franchise was an abject failure and turned into a road team by the end of the season. Baltimore, however, advanced all the way to the 82nd Grey Cup and was a financial success as well.
For the 1995 campaign, the American teams were split off into their own South Division. Las Vegas was folded, while two new teams, the Birmingham Barracudas and Memphis Mad Dogs, were added. The Sacramento team moved to become the San Antonio Texans — an ironic occurrence, since a San Antonio team was to have been admitted into the CFL along with the Gold Miners for 1993 but folded before taking a single snap. 1995 saw the Stallions become the first non-Canadian team to win the Grey Cup.
The success of the CFL's U.S. expansion was mixed. Baltimore and San Antonio had sustainable operations and were expected to return in 1996. Memphis and Birmingham had reasonable success in 1995 but ran into severe attendance problems during college football season; Shreveport, although it had solid attendance, did not fare well on the field and suffered from poor management. By the end of the 1995 season, Shreveport and Birmingham moved out of their cities and ultimately folded, and Memphis followed suit. When Art Modell, owner of the NFL's Cleveland Browns, announced he would be moving his team to Baltimore to become the Baltimore Ravens, the Stallions moved to Montreal, becoming the revived Montreal Alouettes. San Antonio decided not to continue operations as the only American team and folded shortly thereafter. By the 1996 season, the Canadian Football League was once again based entirely in Canada.
[edit] Recent history
After three seasons that included American teams, the CFL American expansion experiment came to a close, as the CFL returned to an all-Canadian format in 1996 with nine teams; however, the Ottawa Rough Riders, in existence since 1876, folded after the 1996 season, due to poor ownership and fan support, in addition to an aging facility which no longer was suitable for providing a profitable location for professional football. In 2002, the league expanded back to nine teams with the creation of the Ottawa Renegades. After four seasons of financial losses, the Renegades were suspended indefinitely before the 2006 season; their players were absorbed by the remaining teams in a dispersal draft.
In 1997, the NFL provided a $3-million USD interest-free loan to the financially struggling CFL, as CFL teams were losing money after the failed US expansion. In return, the NFL was granted access to CFL players entering a defined two-month window in the option year of their contract. This was later written into the CFL's collective bargaining agreement with its players. The CFL's finances have since stabilized and they eventually repaid the loan. The CFL–NFL agreement expired in 2006. Both leagues have been attempting to reach a new agreement, however the CFL broke off negotiations after Rogers Communications paid $78-million to host eight games of the Buffalo Bills over five seasons. [12][13]
The league had struck a committee in 2003 to examine the feasibility of adding a tenth team (which has been a long-standing CFL ambition), with the leading candidate cities being Quebec City and Halifax.[14] Exhibition games were held in Quebec City in 2003[15] and in Halifax in 2005. The Halifax event, dubbed Touchdown Atlantic, was scheduled to repeat in 2006 but was cancelled after the suspension of the Ottawa Renegades franchise.[16] Commissioner Tom Wright had indicated that Halifax was the leading candidate for expansion.[17] Moncton is also pursuing a CFL team and, though the city is constructing a stadium for the World Junior Track and Field Championships, set for opening in 2010, the seating, and field itself would have to be expanded for a CFL team.[18] The mayor of Moncton, premier of New Brunswick, and league commissioner Mark Cohon met in February 2009 to negotiate a deal that would see the city host a regular season game annually over five years, beginning in the 2010 CFL season.[19]
In 2005, the league set an all-time attendance record with a total attendance of more than 2.3 million.[20] With the absence of Ottawa in 2006, the league recorded total regular season attendance of 2,112,696, increasing the average per-game attendance to 29,343. This is the third highest per-game attendance of any North American sports league and the seventh highest per-game attendance of any sports league worldwide. A recent survey conducted at the University of Lethbridge confirmed that the CFL is the second most popular sports league in Canada, with the following of 19% of the total adult Canadian population compared to 30% for the NHL. The NFL had 13% following, with a total of 34% following at least one of the pro football leagues. This could be interpreted to mean that approximately 80% of Canadian football fans follow the CFL and about 55% follow the NFL.[2] The 2007 CFL season marked the sixth straight season of over two million attendance in regular season. Though slightly less than 2006, the 2,100,016 total attendance figure showed greater over-all strength as the average game attendance rose to 29,167, the highest since the 1983 season.[21] Leading the growth were the Roughriders with six consecutive sellouts, the Blue Bombers with five consecutive sellouts, and the Argonauts, whose average attendance of 30,931 was their highest since 1992.[22] The 2007 Grey Cup champion Roughriders were named Canada's team of the year by Canadian Press and credited with rekindling interest in football in the West.[23]
In 2008, the CFL re-awarded the former Renegades franchise to Ottawa 67's owner Jeff Hunt, who will likely launch a new Ottawa franchise in 2013 pending reconstruction of Frank Clair Stadium
