Canadian Football League
Current season, competition or edition: 2017 CFL season
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| Sport | Canadian football |
|---|---|
| Founded | January 17, 1958 Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Inaugural season | 1958 |
| Commissioner | Jeffrey Orridge |
| Motto |
What We're Made Of Voici qui nous sommes |
| No. of teams | 9 |
| Country | Canada |
| Headquarters | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Most recent champion(s) |
Ottawa Redblacks (1st title) |
| Most titles | Edmonton Eskimos (11) |
| TV partner(s) |
TSN TSN2 RDS |
| Official website | cfl |
The Canadian Football League (CFL; French: Ligue canadienne de football, LCF) is a professional sports league in Canada. The CFL is the highest level of competition in Canadian football, a form of gridiron football closely related to American football. Its nine teams, which are located in nine separate cities, are divided into two divisions: the East Division, with four teams, and the West Division with five teams. As of 2016, the league features a 20-week regular season, which traditionally runs from late June to early November; each team plays 18 games with at least two bye weeks. Following the regular season, six teams compete in the league's three-week divisional playoffs, which culminate in the late-November Grey Cup championship, the country's largest annual sports and television event.
The CFL was officially founded on January 19, 1958. The league was formed from a merger between the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union founded in 1907 and the Western Interprovincial Football Union founded in 1936.
Rugby football began to be played 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 1891, and served as an umbrella organization for several provincial and regional unions. 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 from its rugby origins, and started to become more similar to the American game. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the two senior leagues of the CRU, the eastern Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (IRFU or Big Four) 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 Cup challenges. The ORFU withdrew from Grey Cup competition after the 1954 season, 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 competed for the Vanier Cup).
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