Canadian Football League in the United States


The Canadian Football League briefly expanded to the United States from the 1993 CFL season through the 1995 CFL season. Canadian football, a form of gridiron football differs from American football played in the United States, primarily due to its three-down structure and larger playing area.
The first American team, the Sacramento Gold Miners, joined in 1993. The league added three more American teams in 1994, after which two more teams joined, one relocated, and one folded to bring the total to five in 1995. That year, the teams were aligned into a new South Division. The three years saw numerous ownership debacles on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border. The Baltimore Stallions became the only American-based team to win the Grey Cup championship, in 1995. With the exception of Baltimore, the American teams consistently lost money.
Tension also arose between the American and Canadian contingents over rule changes, scheduling, import rules, and marketing. Accommodating the wider and longer Canadian field proved difficult, a problem at most non-Canadian sites. The league returned to being exclusively Canadian beginning with the 1996 season. Although expansion was the most notable CFL effort in the United States, the league had also made previous inroads. Eleven neutral-site CFL games have been held in the United States. In earlier decades, when the CFL season started much later than it does today, NFL teams were occasionally invited northward for exhibition interleague play.

Pre-expansion era

The CFL had attempted to find a television audience in the United States during the NFL players' strike in 1982. Until 1993, the Canadian Football League, and its predecessor associations, had always operated solely within Canada, despite most other professional sports leagues in North America being cross-border enterprises.
The popularity of the National Football League and NCAA Division I-A football in the United States were generally seen to inhibit the chances of any sort of expansion into the country but given its field dimensions, Canadian football is more pass-oriented than its American counterpart and tends to attract late-career American quarterbacks, such as Doug Flutie and Ricky Ray. A substantial number of Americans regularly follow the CFL, particularly the Grey Cup Championship. TSN, a Canadian-based channel with ties to ESPN, has provided the league the bulk of its television revenues. Although the CFL's presence on U.S. television has consistently been limited to cable TV networks and streaming services, its U.S. TV audience was enough to account for about 20% of the league's total North American viewership during the 2018 season.
Lackluster CFL television ratings in the United States during the 1982 NFL strike, however, rendered future expansion plans ambivalent. A proposal by Bill Tatham to have his Arizona Outlaws and possibly other teams of the moribund United States Football League enter the CFL after the league suspended operations saw little interest in both leagues.

Interleague games

There had been an ongoing degree of cross-fertilization between Canadian and American leagues for several decades prior to the merger of the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the Western Interprovincial Football Union to form the CFL in 1958. Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, football in both countries was often played in facilities designed for baseball, the most popular summer sport in both countries, with both Major League Baseball and minor league baseball attracting large crowds in both countries. As a result, much like their American counterparts, the Canadian leagues played mainly in the autumn after the baseball season had wound down.
Until the early 1960s, such arrangements allowed for a number of CFL–NFL interleague games to be held in Canada. NFL teams handily won most of these contests, however the most compelling reason they were discontinued was that minor league baseball attendance in both countries fell drastically in the 1950s and 1960s, a development which coincided with MLB telecasts reaching an ever-larger audience. This allowed CFL teams to take over several facilities originally designed to accommodate baseball for their exclusive use, and in turn allowed the CFL to play a less compressed schedule that eventually started in early summer. The NFL, by contrast, had neither the need nor the inclination to play throughout the summer in the much warmer U.S. climate, and thus continued to start its schedule in early September, thus making interleague play with the CFL unfeasible.

Neutral site games

Eleven neutral-site IRFU/WIFU/CFL games have been played on American soil. The earliest of these dates to 1909, while the bulk occurred between 1951 and 1967. The 1909 game, featuring the Ottawa Rough Riders and Hamilton Tigers of the IRFU, was sponsored by the New York Herald and played at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; this in the era when the Canadian game was more similar to rugby football and did not feature modern rules such as the forward pass like the American game.
The next game, a 1951 match-up between the IRFU's Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Toronto Argonauts in Buffalo, was billed as the first true all-Canadian game played in the United States. Played in a city that at the time was embittered with the National Football League after its All-America Football Conference team was controversially excluded from a merger with the NFL, the Buffalo game drew more than 18,000 fans – a decent crowd for the era. In 1958, the first season officially played under the CFL moniker, Hamilton defeated Ottawa in a regular-season contest in front of about 15,000 in Philadelphia's cavernous Municipal Stadium, 24–18. It remains the only CFL game played outside Canada, involving two Canadian teams, that actually counted in the standings.
Prior to and after the formation of the CFL, teams of the IRFU were regarded as superior to the Western Canadian teams. Starting in the 1930s, Western Canadian teams began aggressively scouting for and recruiting players from the rich American talent pool, largely in an effort to achieve parity with the East. The American Pacific Northwest became a frequent site for WIFU and later CFL preseason games in the 1950s and 1960s with Western teams, particularly the BC Lions, entertaining their regional neighbours. News reports from the time suggest a hybrid game of three down Canadian ball played on the more restricted 100-yard American field.
One BC–Winnipeg matchup in 1960 was held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, presumably because both teams had a number of former University of Iowa stars. Willie Mitchell, who scored the Lions' only touchdown in a 13–7 loss in front of 12,583, was an Iowan. Western teams were mostly ignored by U.S. clubs as potential opposition for preseason interleague contests, in part due to the more onerous travel requirements to Western Canada. Rail travel was the norm. The WIFU moved up the start of its regular season long before the Eastern section followed suit. It was not until 2019 that NFL teams would play contests in Western Canada.
Most exhibition games involving Canadian teams in the U.S. tended to be characterized by low scores and frequent punting, with crowds between 10,000 and 20,000. These numbers dropped off in the last two games of the era. A low-scoring BC–Edmonton game in Everett, Washington, in 1967 drew just over 6,000. There would not be another CFL game in the United States until the cusp of US expansion in 1992.
GameDateVisitorScoreHomeCityStadiumAttendanceRef
ExhibitionDecember 11, 1909Hamilton Tigers11–6Ottawa Rough RidersNew York CityVan Cortlandt Park15,000
PreseasonAugust 11, 1951Hamilton Tiger-Cats17–11Toronto ArgonautsBuffalo, New YorkCivic Stadium18,146
PreseasonAugust 2, 1957BC Lions8–29Edmonton EskimosPortland, OregonMultnomah Stadium10,261
PreseasonAugust 11, 1957BC Lions6–9Edmonton EskimosSan Francisco, CaliforniaKezar Stadium16,000
Regular seasonSeptember 14, 1958Ottawa Rough Riders18–24Hamilton Tiger-CatsPhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaMunicipal Stadium15,110
PreseasonJuly 29, 1960BC Lions7–13Winnipeg Blue BombersCedar Rapids, IowaKingston Stadium12,583
PreseasonJuly 29, 1961BC Lions13–3Saskatchewan RoughridersSeattle, WashingtonHusky Stadium28,000
PreseasonAugust 1, 1961Calgary Stampeders14–7Saskatchewan RoughridersSpokane, WashingtonMemorial Stadium7,511
PreseasonJuly 9, 1967BC Lions7–2Edmonton EskimosEverett, WashingtonEverett Memorial Stadium6,248
PreseasonJune 25, 1992Toronto Argonauts1–20Calgary StampedersPortland, OregonCivic Stadium15,362
PreseasonJune 24, 1995Baltimore FC37–0Birmingham BarracudasMiami, FloridaOrange Bowl20,216

Television

The idea of attracting American fans through television has long been a goal of the CFL although the results have been intermittent. As early as 1954, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union struck a deal with NBC that lasted a year and featured 13 games. The infamous Fog Bowl of 1962 was—at least until play was suspended—broadcast by ABC. Over subsequent years various non-major networks picked up an assortment of games.
The fledgling ESPN cable network signed a deal in 1980 to broadcast 30 CFL regular season games and the playoffs, including the Grey Cup in the United States. CFL games became a fixture of the early years of the network. In 1982, after a September strike by NFL players, the CFL got another chance at major network exposure: NBC bought out the ESPN rights for $100,000 a game to make up for its own lost football programming. NBC aired CFL games on Sunday afternoons with full NFL production values and announcing crews. However, every one of the four games shown was a blowout, and the league and network decided to black out the games on the NBC stations closest to the Canadian border. Ratings were a major disappointment. NBC quickly backed out of the arrangement.