The Canadian Football League had always been fond of its quaint approach to the sport—adding 10 yards to the field here, shaving off a down there, putting 12 players on the field instead of 11 because you can never have too many wideouts, having cavernous end zones and ways to score a single point, even fooling with the nomenclature to include the word "rouge" to describe said point. You need only watch one play to see the difference it makes, because illegal motion is never illegal and as a result every play is a stampede. That's what made it worth bothering with at all.
But CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston, whose main job seems to be looking like Thanos if Thanos were a middle distance runner instead of a destroyer of planets, has decided with the help of his owners to Americanize the game in pursuit of more touchdowns, fewer field goals, and playing dimensions that look more like the American game that Canadian football looks but does not feel like. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with trying to make the game more palatable, mind you, but questions naturally arise in such cases. Starting with, "who decides what is more palatable, and how?"
And the answer Johnston has given in a press release announcing sweeping changes to the game is that "projections" on data assembled by the CFL office claim that these changes will deliver more touchdowns and fewer field goals. Yeah, okay. Cool. Made up numbers based on nebulous data. Man, does that sound like eerily familiar methods of governance down here in the flats.
The CFL is going to ease in the following changes to the game on the field, including:
- Moving the goal posts off the goal line to the back to the end zone, which will be shortened from 20 yards to 15.
- Shortening the field from 110 yards to 100, meaning that we will never again hear the glorious phrase, "It's third and six from the 53, and Winnipeg will have to punt."
- Eliminating the employment of the rouge as a game-winning play. In short, you cannot employ a missed field goal that sails through the shortened end zone to get a point.
- Studying the new rules, which will be phased in over two years, to see how much more American the Canadians want to be.
In short, the CFL wants to be distinguishable from the game played south of the border only by the width of the field—it’s currently 65 yards, though some future shrinkage is believed to be on the table—and by the use of mounties as costumed security for the Grey Cup. In doing so, they will be essentially the same as the 32 NFL teams, the 136 Division I college teams, the 129 Division I-AA teams, the 161 Division II teams, the 241 Division III teams, the various and sundry spring football leagues that nobody watches, and the thousands of junior and community college and high school teams that do it the old-fashioned 'Murrican way.
Which reminds us of a question an old editor liked to ask: "Who asked for this?" I mean, other than Johnston and the rich people to whom he reports? Were ratings plummeting that badly? Were network executives grumbling about 33 percent fewer downs? Were there complaints about too many rouges? The descriptions from the Canadian news outlets were that reaction has been "mixed," which is journalese for "Wait, exactly who did ask for this?"
“The pressure for uniformity” is the obvious answer. The NFL has become the de facto entertainment of choice for people who don't enjoy the high injury rate and ownership-level behaviors of Love Island, and these are not times for the embrace of the unorthodox. Besides, who wants to be the Edmonton Elks when you can be the Tennessee Titans? Sit down, please. We'll get to you all in time.
Why the CFL needs two years to do all this is anyone's guess. Rob Manfred didn't phase in the changes that he and his little wizards made to baseball. They dove in face first, and you may decide amongst yourselves whether they have made the game better for doing so. Saskatchewan owner Craig Reynolds used the league's main talking point as his own: "Three downs, 12 players a side, the wide field, unlimited motion, those are uniquely Canadian. Today wasn't about changing our game, it was around making a great game better."
Given that the stuff he was talking about involved changing the game, it can and therefore will be argued that it was in fact about changing the game. And the only reason to make the game look more like the American game is to make the game look more American. Occam's Razor there, Stewie.
Whether this achieves the announced goal will be deduced only in time, and only if someone other than Johnston can be found to provide the data required to define "better." The last time the CFL decided to scratch its American itch, they put teams in Sacramento, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Birmingham, Memphis, San Antonio, and Shreveport over a three-year period. The idea died like roaches on hot bricks—in an undignified fashion, and to public disgust. That was in 1995, apparently before the cooling of the planet to habitable temperatures and the invention of history.
But no bad idea ever goes unpunished in the current state of things, and so the CFL is doing the closest thing—imitating what it could not join for no valuable reason save craven orthodoxy. It is their game, after all, and they get to decide how they want to mutilate it. After all, why wouldn't you want to be more like the New Orleans Saints? Maybe if they squint hard enough, they'll look like the Montreal Alouettes.
