Football History 101: Why Canadians Have Only Three Downs

Recognize that trophy, class? Ah, our lovely exchange student from Montreal that makes all you heathen boys drool -- she recognizes it. That's the Grey Cup, and it's the reward for the champions of the Canadian Football League. The 94th battle for the Grey Cup takes place this Sunday in Winnipeg.

Now I'm sure many of you may think the CFL is just a refuge for stoners who got busted by the NFL's drug policy or quarterbacks who are unfairly deemed too short to succeed in the NFL, but that's not the case. The CFL has as rich a history as the NFL does. In fact, the leading amateur Canadian football organization was still called Canadian Rugby Union until 1967, even if most of the Canadian rules incorporated many Walter Camp's changes to the American football game, which bore only a slight resemblance to the original Rugby School game.

Still, I bet you're wondering -- why is that American football has a fourth down, but Canadian football doesn't?

You have to go back to the 1880s, when Walter Camp first introduced the scrimmage and down-and-distance rules. The various rugby unions in Canada liked the idea of the scrimmage and decided to implement it, but they didn't want to change the 15-man per side rule -- a nod to the original Rugby Football Union, perhaps.

However, Canada's answer to Walter Camp would appear in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century. John Meldrum "Thrift" Burnside, the captain of the University of Toronto's football team, introduced a new set of rules for the Canadian game called, appropriately enough, the Burnside Rules. These rules reduced the number of players per side from 15 to 12, and they forced teams to gain ten yards in three downs -- as opposed to five, which was Camp's original rule.

Many of the provincial rugby unions resisted the new rules, and even the Ontario Rugby Football Union in Burnside's home province did not adopt these new rules until 1903. Interestingly enough, that was a full three years before the NCAA was formed to "fix" American football. At that time, not only was Heisman's forward pass adopted, but the five-yards-in-three-downs rule was adjusted to ten yards in three downs. Most historians suggest that this adjustment was because of the forward pass, but I wonder how much influence the Burnside Rules might have had on this decision...

Anyway, American football was also three-down football until 1912, when the game's rulemakers decided to increase the number of downs from three to four. The Canadian Rugby Union, however, stuck by the Burnside Rules and chose not follow suit. They might have considered it if not for World War I, which forced the suspension nearly all formal football competition from 1916 to 1918. As the games began to pick up again in 1919, the thought of a fourth down seemed... well, foreign to the Canadian way of football. Thus, it was never adopted.

The forward pass, of course, was adopted by the Canadians, but not until 1929, when it was used on a limited basis at the intercollegiate level. The CRU adopted the forward pass two years later, and a guy named Warren Stevens completed the first touchdown pass in Grey Cup history to Kenny Grant in 1931.

As for the Cup itself, it was donated to the CRU in 1909 by Albert Henry George Grey, then the Governor General of Canada. It was originally intended to recognize the top amateur rugby team in Canada. Of course, professionalism leaked into the game over time, and the Grey Cup is now in the possession of the CFL, and its champion gets to take that Cup home this Sunday night. More than 41,000 people are expected to fill Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg to watch that game, proving that Canadians are almost as crazy about football as Americans are.

That's the fun thing about this lonely little planet. Everywhere you travel, you'll find people who are crazy about football. It's not always the same kind of football in different places, but if it's a football game, it's bound to fill the stadium.

(The 94th Grey Cup Final takes place on Sunday at 6:00 PM and will be televised live in America on the Altitude Sports & Entertainment Network, which either you or your local sports bar can get through DirecTV and Dish Network. For a more complete timeline of Canadian football history, click here.)