O Canada and Your Silly Football Rules

Living in the Detroit area, I sometimes cross the border in the summer, before the American football season begins, to attend Hamilton Tiger-Cats or Toronto Argonauts games. Its good football played in a fun atmosphere, and they sell beer at the games. What's not to like?

The problem, of course, is that Canadian football has some goofy rules. They have a 55-yard line, for Cripe's sake. Their end zone is twenty-yards deep; the field is wider than it should be, and they only get three downs to gain ten yards. Even worse, they allow multiple men in motion -forward motion- at the snap. Why have they bastardized our glorious gridiron game? Why do they not play football as God intended, the American way? Someone had to look into how this terrible situation came aboot and that someone was me.

All red-blooded Americans know that were it not for Canada, America might never have played football. The 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game celebrated as the first American football game was more of a soccer match than any other sport. We discarded that silliness and America now plays football because students at Montreal's McGill University introduced rugby to Harvard in 1874. That led Harvard and Yale to play rugby, and when America's Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) formed in 1876, Harvard and Yale convinced the other schools to play rugby, not soccer. The IFA then tweaked rugby's rules year after year until they had created a new game, gridiron football.

Canada followed a similar but different path. Canadian rugby also evolved away from English rugby with their rules often differing from one province to the next. Many in Canadian rugby avoided taking on American rules, both due to the American game's ruggedness and because the American rules were, well, American. 

The Ontario Rugby Football Union adopted the Burnside Rules in 1903, which largely matched the American football rules of the time, with unique Canadian features. Unfortunately for gridiron fans, they dropped the Burnside Rules after a few years, and old-school Canadian rugby returned with some Burnside rules remaining.

The mix of rugby shorts and football pants worn by the 1906 Hamilton Tigers points to Canadian rugby being a hybrid of English rugby, American football, and Canadian exceptionalism. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1433257)