I've often wondered why the CFL didn't use "meter (metre?)" lines. That field is so big anyway, what's a little more?

:D

We do have an option for metres. 100 of them. We prefer 110 yards.

100 metres = 109.361 329 834 yards

110 yards = 100.584 metres

Remember that American & Canadian football ultimately derive from soccer, which was developed in England, which naturally used English units (yards) to measure their fields.

No, but you're close. Among the alternatives considered to legalizing the forward pass was widening the field, but the cement had been poured for Soldiers Field (The one at Harvard, not Soldier Field in Chicago -- or do I have it reversed?), and it couldn't accommodate significantly greater width.

The length was shortened to 100 yards later, when end zones were provided. Until that time, the amount of space allowed for the ball to be in play behind the goal line was just local ground rule -- theoretically until you hit a fence or whatever. Then it was decided to allow just 10 yards depth to complete a TD pass, although the ball could still be in play for other purposes behind the end line. Some fields, however, didn't have space to accommodate even 10 yards depth unless a little of the field of play was sacrificed, so that's what was done. (I don't think Soldiers was the problem at that time.) In old photos (or the rule book diagram), you can see they extended the chalk of the sidelines a little past the end lines, until the end lines were made field boundaries for all purposes rather than just pass completions.

Robert

Nope, sorry. I can go into more detail if you'd like, but the short story is that the only thing those games have in common is that they derive from England and/or Wales and are called "football".

Football Canada does have optional metre rules, but the CFL doesn't. Some CIAU and other amateur games were played under such rules in the 1970s, but they didn't catch on. Around that time Rugby Union switched to "metric", and later Rugby League.

I don't see the point. It's got to have an effect on play when you need 10 m to get a first down, your kickoff has to go forward 10 m, etc.; it's about an extra yard. It's not as if there needs to be conformity between a game field and the outside world; heck, they can use furlongs etc. And if they wanted to express things in meters, why didn't they make it 9 m, which is much closer to 10 yds.?

Robert

I'd like! I really thought I'd read at some point, though, that the beginnings of what we call "football" were made at the Rugby School, who played the game with much more contact than some other places. When the other schools changed the rules to outlaw such contact, the Rugby folks wrote their own. I believe I read this on Wikipedia (which is, admittedly, not an authoritative source) - at the least, it makes for a good story.[/quote]

I would have to say that such a move would be about as antithetical to the metric system as it gets. :D

Even that is disputed, in that people differ as to how much of their version of the game originated there and how much was taken from a Welsh version of football. Rugby may not have contributed anything more than its name to the game, or may have contributed a lot.

What I think you (or your source) may have had in mind was the attempt to come up with a widely played standardized form of football in England outside of the schools. Rugby School by that time had little or no influence on the course of development of rugby football, it having been taken up by clubs. Anyway, the clubs had fairly well standardized rugby, and other clubs had standardized another version of the game, which you might consider either soccer or a precursor thereof, depending on where you want to draw the line. But when it came to an attempt at a grand amalgamation, a compromise game that would merge both camps, the ruggers were swayed by a particular club which was really anti-merger and sank the merger by insisting that the compromise game have hacking (kicking your opponent's shins -- sometimes knocking them over with a violent leg whip) be legal under at least some circumstances. So rugby & soccer continued to develop separately.

To show how insincere that point had been, the ruggers outlawed hacking just a few years later, with no opposition from the club that'd ostensibly insisted on hacking at the time. (Even at the time of the merger talks, many or most rugby clubs played by rules disallowing hacking.)

Robert