montgomery's miscellany

Introduction

What does the word “football” mean to you? As I'm sure you're aware, this is a controversial question. To the majority of native-born English speakers, “football” refers to the gridiron variety originating in Canada and most popular now in the United States. However, “native-born” is doing much work here, as the majority of the native Anglophone population – 260 million out of 400 million globally – are born in the United States and Canada, skewing the statistics significantly. When restricted to the regional rather than global level, native born English speakers referring to football are actually referring to the most traditionally popular variant of ball-sports-played-on-foot in that region. Indeed, if you were to travel to every former British colony where English remains the dominant language, you would hear the lone word “football” used to refer to Soccer, American Football, Canadian Football, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Australian Football, and Gaelic Football without qualifier. But why? Why are these sports all called football? Which sport was called “football” first? Who owns the term “football?” Should we even call Gridiron and Rugby football “football” when the “balls” in question are lemon and egg shaped respectively and both games have very little kicking?¹ Why does the Wikipedia article for each of these sports reference something called “Medieval Football?” What even is that? Answering these questions was one of two things motivating this article. The other was Blood Bowl, a board game set in a medieval fantasy world with Orcs, Elves, and other such creatures. Instead of fighting on battlefields, these fantasy creatures resolve their differences in a violent sports competition nominally inspired by American Football.² Playing Blood Bowl made me curious: what were the antecedents of modern football games actually like? Is the lore of Blood Bowl, in fact, real life?

Episkyros and Harpastum

It may (or may not) surprise you, but all the games that Anglophones call football allegedly share one common ancestor. In Sparta starting from at the latest 800 BC, a game possibly meant to train young boys to operate as a unit (as claimed by later sources) was developed. The game was called επίσκυρος (episkyros or episkuros), meaning “upon the stone debris” or ocassionally eπίκοινος (epikoinos), meaning “upon or in the common”.³ The game was played on a rectangular field of unknown size, with 3 lines crossing the field horizontally, one at each end and one through the centre. The centre line was referred to as the eponymous “skyros,” specifically because it was typically marked with chips of limestone. The two teams started an unknown distance off the line, and a ball of unknown construction (probably a stuffed animal bladder) was placed on the line by a neutral party. The two teams would then either fight for the ball or determine who starts with the ball in some other fashion (sources vary). The goal of each team was to throw the ball over the heads of the other team and past the line at the other team's end of the field, at which point the game would end immediately.

How exactly the game worked beyond the very beginning and end is not clear.⁵ As will become a consistent pattern throughout most of western history, Greek intellectuals were seemingly too embarrassed by the existence of team sports (as opposed to the individualistic achievements celebrated in the Olympics) to write meticulous accounts of the game. Nonetheless, the game spread out of Sparta and was so popular that at one point a Macedonian Episkyros player was allegedly granted honorary citizenship of Athens in celebration of his talents. As Athenaeus recounts in Deipnosophistai: “The Athenians made Aristonicus the Carystian, Alexander's ball-player, a citizen of their city on account of his skill, and they erected a statue to him.” Now obviously the Athenians had an ulterior motive: sucking up to Alexander the Great, but it is worth noting that Episkyros was a popular enough sport that the ruling class of Athens used prowess in it as a pretext for extending favour.

The Romans, in their typical fashion, allegedly⁴ copied the Greek Episkyros and adapted it to fit their own sensibilities. In the 2nd century BC, following the Roman Republic's ultimate subjugation of Greece, the story goes, the victorious Roman soldiers brought Episkyros home with them. Unlike the Greeks, who were ashamed of the game's popularity with the lower classes, the writers of Roman records found Harpastum worth describing and on occasion, even encouraged their readers to give the sport a chance. The physician and author of medical texts Claudius Galenus (Galen) recommended Harpastum, stating: “[Harpastum is] greater than wrestling or running because it exercises every part of the body, takes up little time, and costs nothing [...] it is a profitable training in strategy.” and “When, for example, people face each other, vigorously attempting to prevent each other from taking the space between, this exercise is a very heavy, vigorous one, involving much use of the hold by the neck, and many wrestling holds.”

It is thanks to this unashamed embrace of Harpastum as a harmless hobby that we know so much about it. Based on my review of descriptions of the game by Pollux, Apollinaris, Galen, Antiphones, Sidonious, as well as a reading of Marindin's 1890 collection of notes on Harpastum, I was able to reconstruct the most common rules.⁶ Harpastum was played on a rectangular field, probably between 80 and 120 metres long and 40 to 60 metres wide. As with Episkyros, three important lines were marked: end zone lines at the far ends of the field, and a centre line at the exact midpoint of the field. The objective of the game was to throw the ball on to the ground within the width of the field but past the line indicating the other team's end zone. The two teams could advance the ball and stop the ball's advance however they liked, almost always in hand a la Rugby as opposed to kicking the ball along a la Soccer. Unlike in Episkyros, where a team scoring immediately ended the game, Harpastum was scored in points with the winning team being whichever had more points at the end of play.

The teams would be equally sized, and could have as few as 5 and as many as 15 players on the field at a time. Antiphones and Sidonious describe three positionals: the Standing players (Stantes), Middle Runners (Medicurrens), and Forwards. Each of these positions specialized into one or two specific skills important to succeeding at Harpastum. The Stantes, equivalent to a hybrid of a Safety and pocket passing Quarterback in American Football or a Fullback in Rugby Football, was tasked with standing in defense by their team's endzone. Typically large and strong but not particularly agile, if a Stantes came into possession of the ball somehow, they were expected to be able to throw it back quite far to a friendly Medicurrens. The Medicurrens were midfield players, specialized in quick running, short passes, and juking out defenders. The Medicurrens also acted as the principle ball carriers, and were typically the player expected to score points. It should be no surprise that the Medicurrens was the most exciting and prestigious of the positionals. Antiphanes describes watching a particularly adept Medicurrens: “He seized the ball and passed it to a team-mate while dodging another and laughing. He pushed it out of the way of another. Another fellow player he raised to his feet. All the while the crowd resounded with shouts of Out of bounds, Too far, Right beside him, Over his head, On the ground, Up in the air, Too short, Pass it back in the middle.” Medicurrens, when faced with a prospective tackle were supposed to be able to dump the ball off quick to one of their fellows and had a reputation for wily trickiness. The trickiness of a good Medicurrens was the source of Harpastum's nickname “phaininda” (to deceive), as Pollux recounts: “Phaininda takes its name from Phaenides, who first invented it,⁷ or from phenakizein (“to deceive”), because they show the ball to one man and then throw to another, contrary to expectation.” Fans of Gridiron Football should recognize the play Pollux is describing as a “pump fake”. The final positional was the Forward. Forwards were mobile to a lesser degree than a Medicurrens, but stronger. Somewhere between the lumbering Stantes and agile Medicurrens in build, the Forward's job principally was to brawl and tackle. As the ball was advanced, Forwards on attack were supposed to block down defenders while on defense Forwards were supposed to bring down the ball carrier while ruining passing attempts. The exact mechanism by which the ball would change possession isn't entirely clear, but it appears that the most common cause of turnovers was intercepted passes.

Harpastum was a game of incredible violence. The historical record of the game is replete with injuries not just of the players themselves but bystanders as well. Harpastum related injuries over the centuries included broken legs, arms, and backs. In one incident, a man receiving a hair cut or a shave at a tonstrina (barbershop) was killed when a pickup game of street ball spilled over into the store. The brutality of the game is not surprising if it is indeed based on Episkyros, as the original Greek game was intended to teach young men martial skills.

The Roman Empire was massive and long-lived, and Harpastum retained popularity throughout most of its existence and across most of its territory. However, for whatever reason following the split of the Roman empire into West (based in Italy) and East (based in Greece), Harpastum declined precipitously in popularity in the Eastern half. As the classical era gave way to the medieval in the Eastern Mediterranean, Harpastum died out there. In the west on the other hand, even after the Roman Empire's collapse, the game would survive and eventually evolve into what sports historians call “Medieval Football.”

Knights in Shining Shoulder Pads

If you look at the Wikipedia articles for any game that calls itself Football in the present day, it will list a mysterious game called “Medieval Football” as its direct ancestor, presumably removed by only a couple of generations or even less. What exactly is this? Unlike Harpastum which was in general one game with slight regional variations, Medieval Football was a broad spectrum of independent games that almost certainly branched off of Harpastum and then may have then syncretized with some local indigenous ball games in the former territory of the Western Roman Empire. Trying to pin down what exactly Medieval Football games were is further complicated by the return of the shameful connotation of the ball-playing sports in Western Europe in this time. When reconstructing these games, we can't rely on the same level of in depth description that we have for Harpastum, instead many of these games are referenced by contemporary sources only in passing and often with a dismissive attitude.

In general, however, it appears that the successor games in the former Roman territories branched off into two subsets following Rome's collapse: “carrying” games and “kicking” games (so labeled in Francis Willughby's post-medieval 1660 text Book of Games), differentiated by the principle action through which the ball was advanced down field. From around the 6th century AD until around the 13th century AD, both variants were interchangeably referred to in England as “playing ball” (literally pila ludicra according to the Venerable Bede or pilae ludus by Nennius) and after the 14th century AD as simply “foot ball” or “football.” Little is recorded in primary sources about the rules of these games until the early modern era. What we do know for sure, however, was that these games were both extremely popular and extremely violent.

As with Harpastum, there were typically no or few limits in either version of medieval football on how violent the contest could be. In multiple cases in medieval England, players were charged with murder for killing opponents during the game.⁸ It should be no surprise then, that the legal authorities of the middle ages in Britain and France (where football was most popular) cracked down on the game frequently. In fact the first recorded instance of the word “football” in the English language was a legal edict issued by the mayor of London banning football games in the streets of London.⁹

Despite their violent nature, football games (of the carrying type especially) took on a literally religious significance in England. The carrying game of football acquired the nickname “Shrovetide Football” in medieval England, as large semi-official exhibition games were organized around Christmas, Easter, and Shrove Tuesday. In fact, these games are still practiced in England to this day in certain parts of the country. Shrovetide football has few rules – except for avoiding manslaughter and grievous harm. Instead of being played on a ~100 metre field, the game is played on the entire space between two villages or neighbourhoods. Each participating polity has a traditional stone or marker for the purpose of playing football and the winner of the Shrovetide game is whichever polity touches the ball to the other polity's marker first. Under traditional Shrovetide rules, there are no restrictions on how the ball can be moved. It is and was not uncommon for the ball to be advanced on horseback (or in a motor vehicle today).

The association of the carrying game with religious festivals was significant enough that it led to their suppression under the Cromwell regime in the 1640s and 50s .¹⁰ Both causes for legalistic suppression of football – religious and in the name of public order – failed miserably. In the middle ages, when the state machinery was primitive, such edicts were simply ignored without consequence. Under the republican regime (arguably the first modern state in Europe) the ban was actually enforced to disastrous effect. 13 citizens engaged in a friendly match of the kicking game were arrested by military authorities in the town of Scarborough in January of 1660.¹¹ On the same day in Bristol, military authorities interceded to break up a football game of the carrying variety. Both towns erupted into riots, which spread to other cities where football was popular. By March 30th, restrictions on football where walked back by most regional authorities and football fans had seized the city hall of York “in warlike manner…with halberds, swords, muskets, fowling pieces and other guns and weapons” (according to a paper by Professor Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick) and demanded a nation-wide end to restrictions on ball playing. The republican government revoked all bans, but not before fining the ringleaders of the York rioters £10 each for “instigating publick disorder.”

In order to reconstruct the medieval form of football, we will rely on the early modern writingof Francis Willughby in his Book of Games. Although Willughby was writing as late as the 1660s, his extensive description of football is the first of its kind since the Roman period. He was writing during a renewed embrace of public sport by the British aristocracy following the downfall of the republican dictatorship, when even a sport as low-brow as football was allowed an academic treatment. Willughby refers to the kicking game as “football” and lays out the rules:

They blow a strong bladder and tie the neck of it as fast as they can, and then put it into the skin of a buls cod and sow it fast in. They play in a longe streete, or a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called Gaols, as A B, C D. The ball is thrown up in the middle between the gaols, as about O, the plaiers beeing æqually divided according to their strength and nimblenesse. A plaiers must kick the ball towards C D gaol, C plaiers towards A B gaol, and they that can strike the ball thorough their enemies gaol first win. They usually leave some of their best plaiers to gard the gaol while the rest follow the ball.

They often breake one anothers shins when two meete and strike both togather against the ball, & therefore there is a law that they must not strike higher then the ball. Tripping Up of Heels is when one followes one of his enemies & to prevent him from striking the ball strikes that foot as hee runs, that is from the ground, which catching against the other foote makes him fall. All the slight is to hit that foot that is mooving and just taken from the ground, & then a little touch makes him fall. Suppose a foot fixed, b mooving from n to m. If it bee strooke on the outside before it comes to C, just against the fixed foote, it falls crosse behind the fixed foot at L and makes him fall. The harder the ball is blowne, the better it flys. They use to put quicksilver into it sometimes to keep it from lying still. The plaiers must at first stand all at their gaols, the ball lying just in the middle betweene them, & they that can run best get the first kick. In this we can see that the kicking form of football has already become significantly less violent that its ancestor game of Harpastum, even before the Cambridge rules neutered it totally. Even so, it seems that while you could not tackle your opponent outright (“therefore there is a law that they must not strike higher than the ball”), you could still trip them down. Willughby describes the carrying game – which he refers to as hurling – as follows:

Hurling is divided into In-Hurling & Out-Hurling. The first is thus. After 20 men or thereabouts are numbered on either party, one takes a leather ball & tosses it up in the midst betweene both sides. He that catches it endeavours to run away with it to the adverse goale. If one of the opposites stop him, either he wrestles (then the ball is throwne to one on his owne side, but the others may intercept it, & taken by one of his owne party, who runs away with it towards the contrary goale &c.) or throwes it if he can to one of his owne side & refuses to wrestle. Outhurling is playd by one parish against another, or Easterne men against the Westerne, or Cornwall against Devonshire. They play in the same manner as the other, but make churches, townes &c. theire goales. If any of them can hold of a stirrop he is not denyed liberty to run with the ball in his hand as fast as the horse goes. Other horses are engaged against him. They runne through the worst of places, quagmires &c. If he that tosses up the ball at the first be not in the middle, he is then to hurle at the furthest goale. Any one that can procure leave from the next Justice of Peace, goes into a markett towne & holds in his hand a wooden ball covered with a silver plate, & by a proclamation invites all that will come to a Hurling, mentioning the time & place. This fellow that finds the ball gathers mony of those that play.

What interest me about this passage is that it actually divides the carrying game in two: it describes a carrying game obviously very similar to Harpastum (“In-Hurling”) and Shrovetide football (“Out-Hurling”). If these were indeed considered separate games – and we have no reason to suppose otherwise – then it implies that it is the “in-hurling” variety that serves as the one-generation antecedent of Gridiron Football and Rugby rather than the academic consensus ancestor Shrovetide football. It is also worth noting that Willughby only gives the name “football” to the kicking game, which is unusual for the time. This is the earliest example I could find claiming that the kicking game and carrying games were in fact separate families rather than the same amorphous game played by the common mobs.

Modern Football

The word “Modern” in the historiographical sense refers to the period of history following the rapid social changes of the 15th and 16th centuries, but in the study of football “modern” (as distinct from “medieval”) refers to the games played after football transitioned from being a sport played by common people to a game with rigidly defined rules developed by the growing bourgeois upper class in the 19th century. The bourgeoisie – who were born from the urban merchant and business owning classes of medieval Europe – were themselves very recently “common” people, meaning that as they rose to power in the states of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, common athletic pastimes like football rose with them and eclipsed sports with a more aristocratic tinge.

If any singular transition from medieval to modern football can be pinned down, it must be what occurred in 1845 at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. Rugby was a school founded in the 1500s as a “public” school opened to the children of any family able to pay for tuition.¹² By the 19th century, this meant that it was one of the network of prestigious schools that trained generations of British colonial administrators, army officers, and sea captains alongside Eton, Harrow, and Winchester College.¹³ It makes sense then, as a nucleus of bourgeois culture, that Rugby would take a game as diverse and nebulously defined as British football and attempt to constrain it to a consistent and rational ruleset. The bourgeoisie have always prided themselves on doing away with medieval superstition and irrationality in favour of sterile and liberal rationalism.

The ruleset that Rugby developed was based on the carrying game of football rather than the kicking game and was inspired by the rules of medieval football that happened to be most popular in the Warwickshire area. The rules as they were laid out in 1845 were written by the physical education department of the school and you can read them in their original form here if you really want to, although there are some glaring omissions (how many points is a try?). The rules were quite similar to modern rugby (of both kinds). The original game of rugby was played on a 110 yard by 65 yard field with 10 yard endzones. The goal of the game was to touch the ball to the ground in the other team's end zone (worth 5 points) at which point you would be given the opportunity to score more points (2) by kicking the ball through upright poles at the front of each endzone. The ball could only be advanced forward by kicking it or carrying it, but could be thrown laterally or backwards. Tackled ball carriers had to relinquish control of the ball to a teammate and players without the ball could only be tackled by the ball carrier.

Immediately the codified game of Rugby became immensely popular with the upper and middle classes of the British Empire. As it spread outwards through the empire, it was tweaked by the settlers who brought it with them to colonial schools. The first of these tweaked versions of football was Australian rules football in 1858, followed shortly after by Canadian football in 1861 (developed right here in Toronto, Ontario). By 1863, Rugby football had escaped the culture of the bourgeois upper-crust and had become popular in England as a general past-time enjoyed by all. Calls went out to further refine a unified code of football and the “Football Association” (FA) was founded by a network of donors interested in the sport and set about writing a new universal code for the game. However, things took a strange turn. The document returned by the FA was not at all like Rugby. It banned hard hits and tackles, ball carrying, and replaced the end-zones with goals. The FA had based their new rules not on the carrying game as many of the organization's initial donors had presumed they would, but instead on the kicking game of football. This result was polarizing, with those donor institutions that were unwilling to accept the new rules leaving the FA in its first year of operation and organizing their own competitor the “Rugby Football Union” by 1871. Eventually, the FA rules would become more popular with the British public, which is why soccer is referred to as “football” in England and “soccer” in the rest of the Anglosphere, where local variants of Rugby had already been established by the time of the FA/RFU split.¹⁴ Rugby is still played at a high level in England despite soccer's much greater popularity, but it has attained a reputation for being a bit of a snobbish sport enjoyed by Eton alumni.

Aside on the history of American Football

If you google “when was the first game of American Football played” or “first game of College Football” you will be served factually incorrect information. This has been my pet peeve and a thorn in my side since before I began writing and researching this article. The false information is the following: “What is considered to be the first American football game was played on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton, two college teams.” This quote is lifted directly from Wikipedia. This is not correct. American Football is a SPECIFIC sport. It is not just any old game of football played on American soil! I have even seen this claim repeated by so called sports ““academics”“.¹⁵

American Football is a Rugby-descended sport played on a gridiron where the ball is moved by carrying it. There are very restrictive rules on when players are and are not allowed to kick the ball intentionally. I ask you this: does this sound like American football to you? “[The game] consisted of 25 players per team and used a round ball that could not be picked up or carried. It could, however, be kicked or batted with the feet, hands, head, or sides, with the objective being to advance it into the opponent's goal. Rutgers won the game 6–4.” This is not American Football! This is the kicking game of football! What Rutgers and Princeton were playing was a more civilized version of American kicking game “mob football” (as medieval football was called at the time). It is basically soccer. It has no relation to American Football in any way other than being a game played in America with a ball on foot.

The first game of American Football, as I explained in my article about Canadian Football, was played in 1874 between McGill and Harvard. American Football is directly descended from Canadian Football and has absolutely no relation at all to the so called “American Football” game played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. It is a genuine disgrace that the NCAA lists the “1869 season” in their College Football archive. The first actual season of College Football was played in 1874 after the McGill-Harvard game with rules inspired by Rugby Football and was won by an undefeated Yale team who went 3-0-0 that year.

The biggest mystery of all is why this is even claimed – and so widely! It is not like this game was the first time a game of medieval (pre-Rugby) football was played in the United States of America. Are Americans just too chauvinistic to admit that their national pastime was not invented in America? They have to claim the 1869 Princeton Rutgers game was American Football because otherwise they would have to admit that the first Gridiron game was played in Toronto? Not only is this unfair to our country, it is also unfair to the Yale football program who should rightly be credited as the first NCAA champions (not Rutgers).

The Football Family Tree

Based on my study on the games pretending to the name “football,” we can roughly organize the history of the sports into a single family tree extending back to Episkyros. This family tree is exhibited in the following diagram:

Extinct antecedents of modern football are shown in red. Games that are played ceremonially but do not have professional infrastructure are shown in yellow. Games with professional leagues are shown in green. Lines show both confirmed and alleged descent. I have left Shrovetide football as the ancestor of Gridiron football and Rugby football rather than differentiating between “In-Hurling” and “Out-Hurling”, as is the scholarly consensus. Calcio Storico Fiorentino¹⁵ and its tenuous connection to carrying game of football is included as a teaser for a future appendix article investigating a dubious claim I found in a late medieval source alleging Italian influence on the development of football in England.

Conclusion

So who owns the name “football” then? Well, nobody, really. The name itself is an invention of the middle ages and the original game or games that it describes no longer exist. Whatever game is called “football” in a specific part of the Anglosphere is more dependent on what variation of modern football was more popular in that region in the 19th century than on any sort of logic about the name's etymology. I will however contend the following: any game that does not allow full contact or violence of some sort should not be calling itself “football” for historical and traditional reasons. Therefore, until soccer allows full on tackling and/or fighting, FIFA should drop the name “football” from its acronym. They can take it back up when I see Messi break somebody's nose. Blood Bowl was real, and we can make it real again.

I ran out of time while writing this article, and had to stay up past my bedtime on November 30th to get it done in time. In the near future, I will go back over this article and correct any spelling or grammar errors as well as add an organized bibliography with my sources. I will also be writing an appendix article covering stuff I didn't have time for in this article, mainly about medieval football in Italy.

Footnotes

1. Despite Europeans online smugly referring to Girdiron Football as “Handegg”, the ball used in American and Canadian Football is in fact officially called a “lemon” according to the Football Canada rulebook. Perhaps calling it Footlemon would satisfy the complainers. The NFL instead refers to this shape as a “prolate spheroid,” but Footprolatespheroid simply does not roll off the tongue.
2. Blood Bowl's tagline is “the real game of fantasy football” and officially claims to be inspired by American Football, but Blood Bowl actually bears little resemblance beyond the superficial to the real life sport. Indeed, with the lack of play stoppage and inherently limited substitutions, the game is more like rugby with no onsides rule and legal forward passing.
3. Whether or not κοινος refers to “[upon the] common land” or “[in] common” as in “in a team” is apparently not unambiguous. I found more sources supporting the latter interpretation, however in his article Epikoinos: The Ball Game Episkuros and Illiad, David Elmer summarizes the common counterargument: “Episkuros was not the only ancient game (ball or otherwise) played in teams or groups, so that, on this view, the name would not refer to a particularly distinctive feature. “
4. Whether or not Harpastum was copied directly from Episkyros or in fact the Romans simply retroactively claimed that it was is not entirely clear. It's hard to directly compare the two games, as we have much more documentation on the procedures of Harpastum than we do on the specifics of Episkyros.
5. This hasn't stopped FIFA from claiming Episkyros as the original game of Soccer. Technically, they are correct, in the sense that English medieval football descends from Episkyros by way of Harpastum, but one of the few things we know about Episkyros is that very little kicking of the ball was involved.
6. I say most common rules because like all pre-modern sports games, there was not necessarily a universally agreed upon set. The Roman empire was massive, and Harpastum was played from Scotland to Egypt, with presumably many tweaks to rules from region to region.
7. Almost certainly not.
8. As the English version of the edict reads: “forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over footballs in the fields of the public from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future.” The edict was also issued in French, wherein the football is referred to as “pelote de pee” (lol).
9. This was especially common in university towns, frequently with both the perpetrator and the victim being a young student. In the most famous incident, a group of unnamed Irish students murdered an English student named Adam of Salisbury during the course of a game played on the streets of Oxford.
10. Cromwell was England's head of state during the country's brief republican period. Despite the radically progressive nature of his regime, he and his core supporters were devout puritans. Puritans were egalitarian minded (based) but also opposed all public displays of fun and all religious holidays (cringe).
11. Although the republican era is usually associated with the austere character of Oliver Cromwell, this was actually during the reign of the republic's 3rd and final head of state: Committee of Safety Commander-in-Chief Charles Fleetwood.
12. This is why in Britain a “public” school actually refers to a school that rich kids go to (what we would call a private school). They are not “public” in the sense of public ownership but public in the sens that anyone of sufficient net worth may attend.
13. The influence of these schools was so great on the new British upper class of the 18th and 19th centuries that the Duke of Wellington himself once claimed “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
14. The word “soccer” itself comes from a 19th century fad in English slang. At the time, it was common to add the syllable “er” to the end or replace the final syllable of words as a joke. As a result, “Association Football” (as FA rules football was called) was shortened to “Assoccer” and finally “soccer”.
15. John Eisenberg – you better PRAY I don't see you in the streets of North York. This is a threat. I am putting this in the footnotes because it's less likely your lawyer will find it.

In 1928, Dr Harrison Martland, a retired Lt. Col. in the US army's medical services cum county pathologist for Essex County, New Jersey released a paper proposing a newly discovered form of dementia. He called this dementia 'punch-drunk syndrome' and claimed it was most likely a non-congenital variant of Parkinson's Disease. The name came from the vernacular of the subjects Dr Martland observed the disease in: a cohort of professional boxers, each with more than 50 fights. In the world of professional boxing, being 'punch-drunk' referred to the symptoms of disorientation, unsteady gait, tremors, memory issues, and mental fog one experienced as a result of a concussion. Dr Martland observed that a significant number of boxers exhibited permanent low-level concussion symptoms in constellation with emotional dysregulation, suicidal ideation, and poor impulse control. Martland proposed that the repeated traumatic brain injuries suffered by boxers during the course of a boxing match were causing persistent brain damage and inducing early-onset dementia in elite boxers, but did not bother evaluating athletes in other sports or the general population.

Until 1948, it was assumed that punch-drunk syndrome was a problem unique to explicit combat sports like boxing and that certain players were prone to the disease and others were effectively immune to it. The first of these myths was dispelled in 1949, when neurologist MacDonald Critchley released the paper “Punch-drunk syndromes: the chronic traumatic encephalopathy of boxers,” and the second in 2005 with Bennet Omalu's paper “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a national football league player.” As it turned out, any sufficient and repeated disturbance to the position of the brain in a person's skull causes the disease, by then renamed to the more neutral 'CTE.'

The development of CTE does not require, as Critchley and Martland believed, direct blows to the head nor are some people particularly resistant to it. The brain sits in your skull in more or less a pool of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). It is not secured in place in any way other than by connection to the spinal cord and small amounts of connective tissue. Any time your head snaps forward or back, the brain sloshes in place and risks damage against the hard surface of the skull's interior. This phenomenon is obvious when a concussion occurs, in which the brain strikes the surface of the skull hard enough to cause temporary disorientation, but it also happens pretty much any time you are struck hard enough on the head that it hurts, any time that you are brought to a sudden stop while moving very fast, and any time you are exposed to a shockwave (e.g. by proximity to a very loud noise or explosion). Whenever this happens, a few things occur that contribute to the risk of developing CTE. The first is ruptures in the very tiny blood vessels that lace your brain. The rupturing of these vessels damages nearby brain cells, often permanently destroying them. Secondly, the energy introduced by the blow causes the spontaneous misfolding of an important protein called the Tau protein. Tau proteins are critical to the healthy functioning of brain tissue, and the presence of misfolded tau proteins causes the breakdown of nearby brain cells. In patients with advanced CTE, disordered tau proteins accumulate on the surfaces of the brain and cause the brain to begin breaking down from the outside inward. It is important to note that this process is not determined by genetics, it is a matter of simple biochemistry. Anyone who sustains enough hits to the head can develop CTE, as there is no way to avoid the blood vessel ruptures or tau protein misfolds that cause the disease except by not being hit in the head.

Why didn't we notice CTE until 1928?

Everyone will experience the brain injuries responsible for CTE to various degrees throughout their life, however the threshold of ruptured brain blood vessels combined with the critical mass of misfolded tau proteins is very high. You would have to take thousands of sub-concussive blows to the head or suffer more than a few concussions before you would begin to feel symptoms of lower stages of the disease. This belies the reason for CTE's relatively recent discovery compared to the wider family of dementia. Simply put: men* were not getting hit in the head enough for any well-known person to have the disease until the professionalization of sports.

Before the 20th century, sport was not really a professional affair. There were few, if any, famous paid athletes. Many leagues, including the top level leagues in soccer, rugby, and gridiron football prohibited the direct payment of players. Instead, professional athletes relied entirely on endorsement deals and under-the-table compensation. Being a professional athlete before the 1920s was not a glamorous job, and athletes earned well below average salaries. The most popular sport in Canada and the United States during the 19th century – gridiron football – was played mainly at the collegiate level, with famous athletes graduating into normal jobs after brief careers. The NFL, which sanctioned direct payment of players, would not exist until 1920 and the Canadian Football leagues would not endorse professionalization until well into the 1940s (although by 1920 most successful clubs were paying their players anyway). Boxing, the sport in which CTE was first identified, did not professionalize until 1891.

The amount of trauma you would have to experience to develop severe CTE is so great that until sports was professionalized, the majority of athletes (but not necessarily all athletes, as we will discuss) were not playing long enough to develop it. With professionalization came optimization. Not only did the careers of contact sport athletes balloon in length with the creeping in of professionalization, but so did the intensity of athletic training. It wasn't just that sporting clubs and boxing gyms want to extract the greatest value from the athletes they were now paying, but the athletes themselves were increasingly personally and socially incentivized to sacrifice absolutely everything in pursuit of making it to the top. By the time the first NFL player was officially diagnosed with CTE during an autopsy in 2005, American Football had transitioned from a casual sport to a national lottery ticket. The implicit promise of professional sports is this: if you are genetically blessed and work hard enough, you will catapult your family to extreme heights of wealth. In a system as brutally unequal as ours, millions of people are going to try that path knowing they have no other way to escape the indignity of proletarianization, even if it means becoming mentally and physically disabled before age 30.

* I use the word 'men' here deliberately. In fact, a shocking number of non-athletic women develop CTE. Twice as many women suffer from CTE relative to men (5% of men vs 10% of women) due to head trauma sustained as a result of domestic violence. CTE is not a new phenomenon, measurement of it is.

CTE and Football

On July 29th, 2025 former high school football player Shane Tamura opened fire in an office building hosting the headquarters of the NFL before turning the gun on himself, shooting himself in the chest to preserve his brain for study. According to Tamura, he had played 4 years of football at the JV and Varsity levels as a running back*, which he believed at left him with severe CTE. He claimed that the NFL had deliberately curated the competitive environment in high school football that does not adequately inform children of the risks of football while doing nothing to mitigate the likelihood of traumatic brain injury. What makes Tamura's claims particularly resonant is not just that he was found to actually have CTE in a subsequent autopsy completed earlier this week, but that he is not the first NFL player to develop CTE and become homocidally violent. Most famously, New England Patriots Tight End Aaron Hernandez was convicted of murder, killed himself, and was found to have Stage 3 CTE at age 27 during his autopsy.

Tamura was both right and wrong. In truth, Tamura was unlucky. Football certainly dramatically increases your risks of CTE even at the high school level, but only 20% of former high school players who play for all 4 years of eligibility develop the disease, which is 4 times the level of the general population of men but is hardly a guaranteed outcome. He is correct, however, that he was probably not made aware of the risks and the NFL is at fault for that. The NFL is very involved in amateur football at all levels, and could easily mandate stricter education on risks and strict eligibility criteria such as the immediate ending of an amateur player's career after 1 concussion, e.g., but chooses not to. The NFL could discourage children from playing tackle football entirely as the CFL does – encouraging minors to play flag football instead, but doing so risks jeopardizing the future massive talent pool the NFL relies on to both sell tickets and maintain leverage over its players union (one of the weakest in American sports).

Unfortunately for the NFL, public knowledge of the risks that football poses to brain health has increased significantly since Omalu's case report in 2005, which does pose a risk to youth football. Informed parents are less likely to enroll their children in tackle football than before knowledge of CTE was common, and youth football enrollment has declined by ~6% in the US since the report was released.

* a position in gridiron football equivalent to a centre or fullback in rugby. Running backs are particularly vulnerable to injury, whether to the brain or otherwise. This is because of the specific role of the running back, who is tasked with punching the ball through the defensive line (one of the physically largest groups of players on the field), and the body type prioritized for the position (smaller players are typically put in this position due to their lower centre of gravity).

CTE and other sports

Sucks to be the NFL or whatever organization it is that is in charge of MMA nowadays, one supposes! As evidence mounts on how easy it is to get CTE from not just fighting but also football, it may appear that those sports are uniquely doomed. The NFL does not seem worried, though, and for good reason. The pendulum of evidence begins to swing in the other direction and all the NFL has to do is wait.

The reason why CTE was first noticed in boxing is that combat sports are uniquely violent. Football was the second sport to have a major crisis with CTE because it was simply next on the list of most violent sports, but as scientific interest in CTE has increased so has the evidence that the best athletes in basically every sport are getting it. The dam broke on this in 2020, when autopsies of Rugby and Australian Rules Football players found significant rates of CTE. Then, ice hockey, and even baseball and soccer were eventually found to significantly increase the risk of CTE. Football is bad for your brain, but not uniquely so. The NFL gambled that the whole CTE thing would blow over, and they are probably going to be proven right. As more and more sports are found to raise your risks of CTE, the risk sustained by football players will be washed away in a tide of noise. CTE, it turns out, has more to do with being a professional athlete than what sport that athlete happens to play, even if certain organizations have obfuscated the particular level of risk of their particular sport for their own benefits.

What should we be doing about CTE?

To be clear, I am not saying that football's risks are exaggerated in the aggregate. CTE is not the only potential risk from playing football. Famously, Calvin “Megatron” Johnson was left permanently unable to run after his retirement from the NFL, as he had sustained so many fractures in his lower legs that his ankles had fused from improper healing. All it takes is one bad play to be paralyzed or worse, even if you don't play long enough to raise your CTE risk. What I am saying, however, is that the specific threat of CTE will not kill football. You could make the argument that through their own actions, the NFL has caused thousands or even millions of people to suffer the effects of CTE and something should be done about this. But what?

The NFL's status as the world's most profitable sporting institution on Earth makes it nigh untouchable in the United States. Even attempts to regulate it without holding the NFL accountable for its role in all this are essentially impossible. Last year, the state legislature of California, the state in the union that is ruled by an unholy union of tech nerds and granola hippies and therefore should be the most amenable to shuttering football passed a bill restricting organized tackle football to people over the age of 12. The bill was vetoed and even if it hadn't been vetoed, it would've been swiftly struck down by the first court it was challenged in. I don't think there is anywhere in the United States with the political will to mandate a curtailment of the risks of American Football to the athletes who play it and I don't think any theoretical advocacy group would ever succeed in boosting that cause.

The fight to reduce the risk of CTE is further complicated by the fact that technically speaking, CTE can only be diagnosed in autopsy. Research is ongoing in making misfolded Tau proteins show up on PET scans, but as of now, there is no way to know if an amateur athlete needs to retire for the sake of their brain until they're already dead. Hopefully, the research advances on this to the point where conscientious athletes or their guardians can monitor their brain health and step out when the risks have become too great, but I'm not holding my breath (remember the economic incentives to ignore all this!)

Do not forget, though, that football is not the only game that gives you CTE. Even if football were to disappear from the Earth tomorrow, the only real answer to CTE is the end of professional sports itself. It was not sport as a past-time that has caused the rise of CTE in athletes, it is sports as a profession. The obsession with optimization and training incentivized by sports as the only realistic escape from grinding poverty for billions of people. Before the NFL and MMA and FIFA, people were playing street football, joining boxing gyms, and kicking soccer balls around in fields every once in a while without realistically risking CTE. Professionalization of sports is an inevitable result of capitalism. People enjoy playing and watching sports, thus it must be marketized and commodified. I leave you with the following advice: don't let your future kids play tackle football.

“Whatever,” to paraphrase Donald Trump, “I'll keep watching that garbage.”

Frontmatter

This article is an incredibly long argument for why I find the NFL relatively boring and the CFL incredibly exciting, even though NFL players are objectively better athletes. The article mainly focuses on the rules differences and cultural context of the two games. If you are an American, just know that I love you and this article is not an attack on you, it's an attack on a version of football that I do not like.

The first two sections explain the historical context of football and the rules of football. If you already know the rules of both types of football, skip section 2. If you know the rules of one type of football but not the other, you should read section 2. If you don't know anything about football, I've provided a glossary section at the end of the article that explains in detail what the terms mean. If you don't find sports interesting but want to know why I love Canadian football for meta-game reasons, skip sections 2 and 3. If you like sports but hate football, you are an insufferable contrarian. Read the entire article in penance.

1. Historical primer

In 1861, 13 years before the first snap was played on American soil, two groups of students at UofT gathered in a common area on school grounds with the goal of playing a game inspired by accounts of the full-contact “Rugby football” game played at the Rugby Public School. At the time, “Rugby football” (not to be confused with the technically younger than Canadian football “Association football”, codified by the Laws of the Game two years later in 1863) was a game played at English boarding schools without a strict rules code and was yet to develop into the modern Rugby Union format, an entirely different sport that I also enjoy watching. Those Canadian students didn't know it yet, but their strange broken-telephone interpretation of a game for wealthy British children would serve as the foundation of the single most profitable professional sports league on planet Earth.

Over the next few years, as Americans shot each other over slavery , the first inter-collegiate football rivalry was established between Toronto's “Varsity Blues” and McGill's “Redmen.” In 1874, an exhibition game between McGill and Harvard using Canada's version of Rugby football was played to a riveting 0-0 finish after 3 quarters (you'd think McGill and Harvard students would know how to count to 4!) This was the first time that football as it currently exists was played in the United States, and was an instant success despite the appalling score.

From Harvard, McGill, and UofT, football spread across Canada and the United States. Initially a collegiate game, it did not take long for the first pro team, the Ottawa Football Club(still a member of the CFL), to be established in Canada's capital in September of 1876. In 1892, the first American pro team, the Alleghany Football Club (now defunct) was established. American and Canadians played the same game until 1906, when the Americans added an objectively positive innovation to increase scoring: the forward pass. To the NFL's credit, this is a great change. In 1912, the games permanently diverged after a series of further changes designed to increase scoring were added by the American side.

All of this is to say that football is a Canadian sport. The American game is in fact a bastardization of our perfect game of football! In this article I will argue that the rules of Canadian Football make for a more enjoyable viewing experience than the American rules, which seem perfectly tailored to bore both players and spectators alike.

2. The rules of the Canadian and American games

At their core, American and Canadian football are more similar to each other than either is to their closest taxonomic relatives, Rugby league and Rugby union. In both footballs, the objective is to out-score the other team. Scoring is done in the following ways:

• A touchdown for 6 points
  • After a touchdown, the scoring team sets up 25 yards from the uprights and attempts to score a field goal, giving an additional 1 point.
  • Alternatively after a touchdown, the scoring team may choose to set up on the 5 yard line and attempt to score a second touchdown for 2 points.
• A field goal for 3 points
• A safety for 1 or 2 points.

Football differs from Rugby primarily through the downs system. Teams are divided into attackers and defenders. Each play, the attacking team sets up on the current line of scrimmage, and attempts to advance the ball. The attackers must achieve a gain of at least 10 yards in 3 downs (Canada) or 4 downs (USA). If they succeed, the down count is reset to 1 and they remain on attack during the next play. If they fail, they hand the ball to the current defenders and the role of attacking team and defending team swaps.

During each play, the following options are available:

• The attacking team may throw the ball forward one time.
• They may throw the ball backward as many times as they wish.
• They may hand-off the ball to another player as many times as they like.
• They may surrender control of the ball by kicking it down the field. If they are not attempting to score a field goal, this play is called a punt.

When a touchdown is scored, the scoring team becomes the defenders (if they weren't already) and the scored-on team becomes the attackers (ditto).

The American and Canadian games share all of the above features, but differ in the following ways. Changes made by the Americans in 1912 are marked in bold:

• In the Canadian game, the attacker has 3 downs to gain 10 yards. In the American game, they have 4 downs to gain 10 yards.
• The Canadian field is 110 yards by 60 yards, for a total play surface of 7150 square yards. The American field is 100 yards by 53.333 yards, for a total play surface of 5333.333 square yards. Canadian endzones are also twice as long at 20 yards to America's 10. Diagrams of the fields side by side are given below:
• Canadian teams may have 12 players on the field at one time, American teams may have 11.
• Canadian teams may kick as many times as they want in a play from anywhere on the field, although only the first kick can score a field goal. American teams are allowed 1 kick per play and must kick from behind the line of scrimmage. The defenders may never kick the ball intentionally in American football, but defenders can (and do!) punt the ball back in Canadian football to avoid a Rouge.
• Canadian teams may score a single point by kicking the ball through or in to the other team's end-zone. See Rouge in the glossary.
• Canadian punt-returners – the players responsible for catching and fielding a punt – must be given a 5 yard halo until the ball lands. Violating this halo causes a foul (see flag). This is because either team can recover a punt in Canadian football! In American football, this requirement does not exist because a punting team may not recover the ball on the same play except via fumble recovery.
  • In order for the attackers to recover their own punt, a play referred to as the onside punt or trick punt, the ball must be kicked from behind the line of scrimmage and recovered by a player who was standing behind the kicker when the ball was kicked. This play is not allowed in American football. In the event an onside punt is successfully recovered, the down count is reset even if less than 10 yards have been gained.
• A defending team receiving a punt in Canadian football is entitled to one forward pass during the play. This was recently outlawed in American Football.
• American football players may avoid returning a punt or kickoff by waving for a fair catch or kneeling in their own endzone for a touchback. This is not allowed in Canadian football, as all kicks must be fielded.
• In Canadian football, the attacking team must return to the line of scrimmage and start the next play within 20 seconds of the previous play being blown dead. In American football, the attacking team has 45 seconds to start the next play.
• The clock is paused between plays in Canadian football in the last 3 minutes of each half, while in American football timer constantly runs regardless of current game clock.
• In American football, the waggle is banned, while in Canada it is allowed.

3. Why do I like the Canadian rules more?

The changes made to the American rules in 1912 were intended to make the game more offensively focused and therefore more interesting. There is a saying in football strategy: “Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.” The point of this proverb is that the fans love Quarterbacks and Wide Receivers much more than they like Defensive Backs and Linebackers. Offensive plays are cooler and more exciting than defensive plays. The goal of a football team is to sell tickets and the goal of a football fan is to have fun watching football, so increasing the game's average offensive output is an admirable goal. Unfortunately, the changes made by the American rules have had the opposite of the intended effect.

On average, a pro football game in Canada sees 50.3 points scored, 528.6 passing yards thrown, and 199.9 rushing yards for a total average of 728.5 yards of gross offense. In an NFL game, the average points scored is a measly 46.0, passing yards is held to a mere 437.0, but rushing yards are much higher at 243.2 for an average gross offense of 680.2. (Stats as of 2023)

But why? NFL defenders (who almost universally have never watched a CFL game) will tell you that the CFL is a punt fest! 3 downs is not enough to advance the football! WRONG. 3 downs is the perfect amount and 4 downs slows the game down significantly. Consider the following basic math: a CFL offense must gain an average of 5 yards per play (as they usually punt on 3rd down). An NFL offense must gain an average of 3.334 yards per play before punting. Combine that with the following statistics: the average number of yards gained by a rush play is 4 and the average number of yards gained by a successful pass is 8. Do you see where this leads? With 4 downs, NFL teams are able to run chunk play books with short yard gains every play and barely any passing, because they can expect to advance 12 yards in the 3 safe downs they have before the 4th down punt. Meanwhile, CFL teams are forced to throw electrifying long bombs on every possession!

The gasping desperate NFL fan when presented with these basic facts tries one last gambit: kicking is boring and the CFL has too much kicking! Sure, there are twice as many punts in a CFL game on average (18 vs 8), but first of all, it's called FOOTball so there should be lots of kicking and second of all kicking would not be boring if the 1912 rule changes hadn't made it boring. Canadian kicking is wild and entertaining. The onside punt – a banned play south of the border – makes any punt attempt potentially as exhilarating as an onside kick attempt. Onside kicks and punts in Canadian football are allowed to be trick plays while the onside kick – the only interesting kicking play allowed in the NFL – has been neutered with the latest rule changes made by the No Fun League. Furthermore, the much maligned Rouge leads to Rugby Union style back and forth kicks that are always a treat to see. To make matters worse, the NFL seems determined to make the American kicking game even more boring. Over the years, they have banned seemingly every fun outcome of kicking. Punt returners are no longer allowed to forward pass, punts must occur behind the line of scrimmage, only one kick is allowed per play, kicks don't even need to be returned (see touchback and fair catch), and so on and so on. At some point, why not just get rid of kicks entirely and rename the American game “Handball?”

The worst American innovation of all has been the 45 second play clock and lack of clock pause at the end of the half. This creates two perverse incentives. American players use the full 45 second down time, eating up clock and leading to less average “real” play time per game. The lack of pause between plays in the last 3 minutes of the half mean that if the team ahead in points gains possession of the ball with less than 2 minutes remaining, they are able to simply delay the game until the clock runs out. The NFL averages as little as 11 minutes of live-ball time over a full 60 minute game! Meanwhile in the CFL, once play is blown dead the players have a mere 20 seconds to rush back to the line and set up the next play. On top of that, in the last 3 minutes of each half, the clock is paused when the ball is blown dead, which has completely eliminated stalling from the Canadian game and allowed incredible comebacks on a regular basis. These two factors lead to more live-play in the CFL.

4. It just means more.

There are reasons beyond the objective as to why I love Canadian Football more than American Football. When put together that reason can be summed up with the word SOVL. Before you continue reading, please watch the following video: CFL | This Is Our League

Why do I love the CFL? Because I live in Canada. I like the Buffalo Bills, but I will never go to a Bills game without shelling out hundreds of American dollars. For $40 last August, I had field side tickets in a packed TD Place cheering on the Ottawa REDBLACKS (and yes, the team's name is officially all-caps). I watched Damon Webb return an 85 yard pick 6 and I saw our rival Argos get dumpstered live. The CFL teams represent my home in a way no NFL team ever can.

Advertising in NFL games is also unbearably atrocious. The average NFL game and American NCAA game has more than 3 hours of advertising! Meanwhile, the CFL offers a free ad-free streaming service called CFL+ available for all fans outside of the TSN coverage area (and easily accessibly be VPN which they don't bother blocking). The CFL wants you to watch football. The NFL wants you to watch Subway commercials.

The strongest argument for the NFL is the athleticism of the players. What honest football fan doesn't love Josh Allen's rushing attack, the Minneapolis Miracle, or Saquon Barkley's backwards hurdle? The NFL has these players because there is more money in the NFL than the CFL. There is more money in the NFL because most Canadians don't care about football while most Americans do – plus there's 10 times as many of them as there are of us. Even if every Torontonian was a double-blue diehard, we couldn't possibly afford a player like Tom Brady. The yet-to-be-born GOAT football player will never play in the CFL.

But that doesn't matter. The Americans who play in the CFL for our entertainment love football so much they're willing to move to another country, learn a different (but better!) set of rules, and potentially get life-altering brain damage for the chance to suit up in a pro game. The Canadians who play in the CFL instead of the NFL (and there are some who choose that, see Nathan Rourke) play here because this country is their home. The CFL has an incredibly passionate fan-base, but to the players the CFL is the league that gave them a chance at greatness, a chance to play for their home team, and a chance to play football as it was meant to be played.

Also fuck soccer.

Glossary

• Interception: if the defending team catches a pass thrown by the attacking Quarterback, the defending team gains possession and immediately becomes the attacking team.
• Fair catch: in order to avoid being tackled by an incoming player from the kicking team, a receiver may wave to signal that play should be blown dead as soon as the ball is caught or hits the ground. This rule only exists in American football. In Canadian football, the ball must always be fielded unless penalty occurs during the kickoff.
• Field goal: a method of scoring worth 3 points where the attacking team successfully kicks the ball through the other team's uprights.
• Flag: a yellow cloth carried by football referees on their belts. Detached and thrown when the referee spots foul play.^1
• Fumble: if a player carrying the ball loses possession of the ball for any reason (drops it or has it knocked out of his hands), either team may pick up the ball and take possession of it.
• Line of Scrimmage: the line of scrimmage is the most forward crossing line on the field reached by a ball carrier on the attacking side during this drive. When play is blown dead, it resumes from this line.
• Pick-6: A “pick-6” is the unofficial term for an interception by the defending team that is carried all the way back to the attacking team's endzone, scoring a touchdown for the defenders.
• Rouge: if the ball is kicked in to or through the other team's end zone by the kicking team without the receiving team advancing it out of their endzone, the kicking team receives one point. This may happen any time, and the receiving team is allowed to avoid it by punting the ball back to the original kicking team. This rules only exists in Canadian football, having been removed from the American game in 1912.
• Rushing: rushing attack refers to a method of gaining yards that does not involve forward passing. Teams specializing in rushing attack prioritize breaking through the other team's line in order to allow a player called a Running Back to carry the ball the required 10 yards.
• Safety: a safety is a rare way of scoring points in both games. If a player on a team is tackled in their own endzone while holding the ball, the defending team receives 2 points. Alternatively, if a two point conversion is attempted and an interception or fumble occurs, the defending team may pick up the ball and attempt to score a touchdown. If the defenders manage to do this, they score a “1 point safety.” There has never been a successful 1 point safety in the history of pro football, although it has occurred at the collegiate level.
• Touchdown: a method of scoring worth 6 points where either team carries the ball across the line separating the play field from the other team's endzone without going out of bounds.^2
• Touchback: if the ball is kicked into the other team's endzone, the receiving team may recover the ball and kneel out the play. This rule only exists in American football. If a CFL player tries to do this, they concede a Rouge.
• Uprights: the poles in the centre of the endzone of a football field.
• Waggle: the waggle refers to the charge towards the line of scrimmage made by wide receivers and running backs in Canadian football. The waggle allows attacking players to build up speed before play begins. The waggle is banned in American football.

Footnotes 1: French Canadians call this a mouchoir. Alouettes and REDBLACKS fans will often shout “Mouchoir!” when a flag is thrown in reference to this, whether they are French or English fans. 2: French Canadians often refer to touchdowns as majeurs. As a result, some English fans refer to touchdowns as major scores in reference to this.