This is the third part of an ongoing series of articles looking back at some of Canadian football’s quirky playoff formats. Today, we’re going to go west and examine a rather peculiar set up for the 1906 season of the Manitoba Rugby Football Union. The MRFU was founded in 1892 and included a number of...

Most football fans like a lot of scoring. You really can’t beat seeing two teams going back and forth and lighting up the scoreboard. Of course, a good defensive matchup can still make for some entertaining football now and then. But back in 1966, a game between Montreal and Ottawa redefined the meaning of a...

This is the second in an ongoing series of articles looking back at some of Canadian football’s rather quirky playoff systems used over the years. A previous article examined how tie schedules and challenge cups were used on the road to the first Dominion championship game organized by the Canadian Rugby Football Union in 1884....

In 1992, the Canadian Football League was looking to grow. Larry Smith was appointed the CFL’s new commissioner with a mandate to expand the CFL. Of course, Montreal and Halifax were high on Smith’s list of potential sites. But so, too, were several cities south of the border. One of these cities was Portland, Oregon....

On August 29, 1917, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported that Earl Grey had died at the age of 65. How well do you know the man who donated the trophy that bears his name, that symbol of Canadian football supremacy? Born Albert Henry George Grey in 1851 in London, England, he became...

When CFL Commissioner Stewart Johnston announced sweeping rule changes to the Canadian game last month, one modification that probably alarmed traditionalists the most was the change to the size of the CFL football field. In 2027, the field will shrink from 110 yards in length to 100 yards between the goal lines. I can certainly...

It’s September 1952 and a new technology - black and white television - is taking the country and much of the world by storm. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) entered the TV business with two flagship stations: CBFT in Montreal and CBLT in Toronto. Grey Cup Advertisement for Sweet Caps cigarettes in the Toronto Star...

Canadian football in November can be cold - especially when played on the Prairies. Bone-chilling temperatures, coupled with blowing snow, made the 1993 Western Final at McMahon Stadium between the Calgary Stampeders and the Edmonton Eskimos one of those games where the weather might have played a bigger role in the game than the players...

In 1909, Governor General Earl Grey donated a trophy to be awarded to the amateur rugby football champions of Canada. The University of Toronto won the inaugural championship with a 26-6 win over Toronto Parkdale. Various teams in Toronto and Hamilton competed in the early Grey Cup contests before the game was put on hold...

Universities in Canada have played football since…well…since football has been played in Canada. Teams from the University of Toronto, McGill University, and Queen’s University played what would become Canadian football long before the CFL and professional football ever took hold. In fact, university teams even competed for the Grey Cup in the early years. In...

When I first started following CFL football in the early 1990s, two issues dominated the league: struggling Canadian franchises and U.S. expansion. They kind of went hand in hand, the idea being that an injection of American money and new markets would help stabilize the existing Canadian teams. The ultimate goal was for the CFL...

Wow. Time sure does fly. It's been just over a year since I launched the Canadian Football History website. Admittedly, I wasn't quite certain there would be an audience for the content I wanted to share here. Sure, I was a football fan and a history buff, but were there others out there who would...

When the Canadian Football League rolled out American expansion in the early 1990s, support for the idea was far from unanimous. Yes, proponents argued that U.S. expansion was the way forward to grow the league and to help stabilize the struggling Canadian teams. But detractors countered that the CFL simply stood too much to lose...

After the Sacramento Gold Miners joined the Canadian Football League in 1993 and despite some scepticism and opposition, the league sought to grow its footprint in the United States with additional teams in 1994 and 1995. Here is a look back at some of the CFL’s other American-based teams. Las Vegas Posse Article in the...

Baltimore Stallions logo (SportsLogos.Net) Doug Phillips was just five years old when his father took him to his first football game at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland. He got to see the Johnny Unitas, the legendary quarterback of the old Baltimore Colts NFL team. Sadly, the Colts left for Indianapolis in 1984, leaving the city...

Of all the U.S. cities that the CFL awarded teams to as part of its American expansion in the 1990s, Shreveport had to be the most obscure choice. Whereas the other cities had teams in the defunct World League of American Football (e.g., Sacramento, San Antonio, and Birmingham) or were brought onboard after failed NFL...

On Friday February 2, 1996, the Canadian Football League officially ended its American expansion efforts. During the CFL’s annual winter meetings, the league announced that the Birmingham Barracudas, Memphis Mad Dogs, San Antonio Texans, and Shreveport Pirates were ceasing operations. And the Baltimore Stallions, having just won the Grey Cup a few months earlier, were...

In the 1950s, the Shriners organization sponsored an East-West all-star game featuring the best players of Canadian football. The game was played the week after the Grey Cup between all-stars from the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (IRFU) and the Western Interprovincial Football Union (WIFU). The first such game was played on December 3, 1955, at...

At high school in the mid 1990s we were asked to use a new technology called the "World Wide Web” for a research project. Yours truly balked and wanted to stick with the tried-and-true volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. I told my friend that I would give it a go but that the Internet was nothing...

In the Spring of 1948, the Hamilton Tigers shocked the Canadian football world when they announced their withdrawal from the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union. A founding member of the league also known as the Big Four, the Tigers traced their roots back to 1869. They were undoubtedly the face of Hamilton football. Hamilton Spectator article...

On October 21, 1911, representatives from the Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba rugby football unions met at the King’s Hotel in Regina to form the Western Canada Rugby Football Union. The new league was considered to be the largest in the world in terms of geography, one that would eventually feature clubs from the entire territory...

On April 24, 1996, one of the most prolific kickers to play the Canadian game announced his retirement. Dave Ridgway played every game throughout his 14-year career in the Canadian Football League with the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Born in England, his family came to Canada in the 1970s. Ridgway played college football at the University of...

With the recent announcement that the CFL is changing its playoff format in 2027, I thought it would be an interesting learning experience to revisit some of the old playoff systems used in Canadian football, starting in 1884. When the Canadian Rugby Football Union was relaunched in 1884, one of its mandates was to establish...

The 2026 CFL preseason is underway with a full slate of games this weekend. I'm always happy to have football back - even if the games don't really matter much to us fans. It's safe to say that the coaches and players themselves get way more out of these matchups than we do. Today, CFL...