The CFL announced major rule changes last year, including a shorter field and smaller end zones for the 2027 season.
“This is all about making our great game even more entertaining,” said Stewart Johnston, the Canadian Football League commissioner, when making the announcement last fall. “We are trading field goals for touchdowns, while improving fan experience in stadiums and at home.
Traditionalists say the proposed changes betray the Canadian game’s proud roots and differences from the better-known U.S. game, just as Canadian patriotism has surged in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump referring to Canada as the “51st state.”
A poll conducted last November by the nonprofit Angus Reid Institute found that Canadian football fans who follow the league closely generally support moving the goalposts from the front to the back, but don’t like the plan to shrink the field by 10 yards (64%) from 110 yards to 100 yards.
CFL’s roots in rugby
The CFL field has measured 110 by 65 yards since the 1980s.
Before that, it was 100 yards long and 50 yards wide.
End zones will shrink from 20 to 15 yards, according to the CFL website.
Another change would be to move the goalposts to the back of the end zone.
Canadian football was based on rugby before evolving into the American style in the 1920s.
Because of the rugby roots from the 1900s, the goalpost currently stands on the goal line at the front of the end zone.
Proposed changes
The league predicts its current goalpost change will produce about 60 more touchdowns per season and a 10 per cent increase in end zone completions.
For the 2025 season, CFL games averaged about 54 points per game, up from about 51 points per game in 2024, the highest scoring average since 2008.
Johnston said the reasoning for pushing the goalpost to the back of the end zone is to “allow passing offences to target the middle of the end zone rather than defaulting to the sides.”
Other changes include a 35-second play clock, mandated opposite-side team benches and the elimination of single points for missed field goals or punts that go through the end zone, he said.
Johnston said that he discussed future changes with players, general managers, and coaches, but did not receive any criticism or pushback. Those claims have drawn mixed reactions from active and former players
B.C. Lions quarterback Nathan Rourke called the rule changes “garbage,” while other players took a different approach and said that the change is “modernizing it.”
Former CFL offensive lineman Peter Dyakowski criticized the changes, saying it was an “Americanization of the CFL — worse than I expected.”
Johnston insisted that “no percentage of these changes were because of any type of comparison to the NFL.
Recent critics of the CFL’s proposed field changes say this move takes away tradition, and there has yet to be any evidence that it improves scoring in the league.
Mark Stephen, play-by-play announcer for the Calgary Stampeders, said he disagrees with the potential changes, which he considers unnecessary and could hurt the game’s future.
“It’s a tradition, it’s a heritage. It’s how players have trained and worked and how offences have been built around it,” Stephen said in an interview with the Calgary Journal.
“I’d see zero justification for it. I just absolutely don’t understand it.”
Even though Johnston has said these changes weren’t meant to make the game more like the NFL, Stephen disagrees. He believes these proposed changes will make the league adopt a four-down style, as in the NFL, rather than the CFL’s three-down style.
“I don’t know what the end game is, but you know, I think he’s not being honest when he says that this does not make the game look more like four-down football,” Stephen said.
CFL changes could lead to changes for university football
Stephen says these proposals are also a surprise to U Sports teams, which he said were neither told about nor consulted on these changes, and that this may also affect lower leagues.
“They weren’t asked about anything. There are going to be two revisions to the stadium and the play. Who’s going to pay for that?” Stephen wonders.
“Just think about other levels of football. Will they feel pressure to fall in line like U Sports, like junior high school, and that age group?”
Stephen says that while Johnston is the commissioner of the future, these changes can seem like a “radical reformation of a game that doesn’t need a radical reformation.”
The verdict on the commissioner’s claims
The commissioner claims the changes will make the game “even more entertaining” while “improving fan experience.”
Johnston insisted at last year’s Grey Cup that, despite some fan backlash, the incoming rule changes would speed up the game and improve scoring.
It’s hard to know if that’s true.
No games have been played under the proposed changes yet.
Since the rule changes won’t take effect until 2027, it’s impossible to know whether they will actually increase scoring, make the game more entertaining, or thrill fans.
We’ll wait and see what happens on the field and what fans think.