The Canadian Football League (CFL) season starts tonight, and that gives us another option on the sports betting menu.  Personally, I’ve always found the CFL a very profitable wagering opportunity but many fans–particularly in the US–aren’t very familiar with it.  In this article we’ll talk about a few of the differences between CFL football and its NFL counterpart, and discuss a few basic betting concepts.  We’ll expand on many of these as the season progresses as well as giving you free betting picks on the individual games.

CFL Football–The Basics:

Let’s start with the differences between CFL football and the US version of the game.  For one thing, the ball used in the CFL is bigger than the NFL football.  It’s slightly longer and fatter than the NFL football, and looks more like a rugby ball than anything else.  The CFL field is longer (110 yards) and wider (65 yards compared to the NFL’s 53.5 yards), and the CFL end zones are deeper (20 yards).  The CFL goal posts are on the goal line, while the NFL’s are  at the back of the endzone.

The CFL game is played with 12 players on the field, with the extra player a receiver on offense and a defense back on defense.  The CFL game gives teams 3 downs to move the ball ten yards as opposed to four (meaning you’ll hear that teams went ‘two and out’ as opposed to ‘three and out’).  There are a few other subtle rule differences, but these are the biggest.

The Single:

There’s also one significant scoring difference–a team is awarded a single point for a missed field goal or a punt that lands in the end zone.  This will occasionally produce scores that cause NFL fans to do a double take (its strange the first time you see a CFL game tied at 1-1).  While it may seem that this point–known as ‘the single’ would wreak havoc with handicapping it doesn’t really impact the outcome of betting as often as you’d think.  I actually can’t recall an experience where the outcome of a bet was determined by a ‘single’ in over 10 years of handicapping Canadian football.

Canadian Player Quotas:

One of the more significant rules is enforced not on the field, but in the front office–teams are required to have a certain number of Canadian players on the roster.  The CFL tweaks this number from time to time, but currently 19 of the 40 players on a roster must be Canadian born.  The reason for this rule is to prevent the CFL from becoming purely a developmental league for aspiring NFL players and to help it retain its uniquely Canadian identity.

For the handicapper, the result is a greater amount of parity.  College football in Canada isn’t played on the same level as in the US, so the talent pool that CFL teams can draw from to fulfill the Canadian player quota simply isn’t as deep.  And while there’s been a number of US born players that have solid careers up north, for the most part they’re those who aren’t quite at the NFL level in terms of size or skill.

Those are the basic differences between the CFL brand of football and that played in the NFL.  At the end of the day, however, its still football and a CFL bettor approaches handicapping in much the same way.  In the next installment of this series we’ll look at some general handicapping concepts that have proven successful over time.

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