CFL

The Canadian Football League (CFL) (Ligue canadienne de football (LCF) in French), is a professional sports league located in Canada that plays Canadian football. Its eight teams, located in eight cities, are divided into two divisions of four teams each(East and West). more...

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The league's nineteen-week regular season runs from mid-June to early November. Each team plays eighteen games with one bye week. Following the regular season, six of the eight teams 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. The CFL, officially founded in 1958, yet tracing its origins to the 1860s, is the highest level of play in Canadian football, the most popular football league in Canada, and most popular sports league in Canada after the National Hockey League.. The Grey Cup trophy and game predate the league by many years, just as does the NHL's championship trophy, the Stanley Cup.

History

Early history

Further information: History of Canadian football

Rugby football had its origins in Canada in the 1860s, and many of the first Canadian football teams played under the auspices of the Canadian Rugby Football Union (CRFU), founded in 1884. The CRFU was reorganized as the Canadian Rugby Union (CRU) in 1892, and served as an umbrella organization that several leagues were part of. The Grey Cup was donated by Governor General Earl Grey in 1909 to the team winning the Senior Amateur Football Championship of Canada. By that time, the sport as played in Canada had diverged markedly different from its rugby origins. From the 1930s to the 1950s the two senior leagues of the CRU, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (IRFU) and Western Interprovincial Football Union (WIFU) gradually evolved from amateur to professional leagues, and amateur teams such as those in the Ontario Rugby Football Union (ORFU) were no longer competitive in their challenges for the Cup. The ORFU withdrew from Grey Cup competition in 1954, heralding the start of the modern era of professional Canadian football, in which the Grey Cup has been exclusively contested by professional teams (Since 1965, Canada's top amateur teams, competing in Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS), have contested the Vanier Cup).

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 nickname: 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 nicknames 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 nickname Toronto Argonauts remains to this day, and after World War II, the two teams in Hamilton—the Tigers and the Wildcats—merged both their organizations and their nicknames, forming the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

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