Interlude: The Rouge and Three Down Football

If you aren’t already, you should be listening to Slate’s Hang Up and Listen podcast. On this week’s show, the team of Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin and Mike Pesca spent a segment discussing the history of the rouge, a scoring play in the Canadian Football League that rewards a point when a team is able to kick the ball into (or out of) the end zone without a return.

No one is really sure about the origin behind the one-pointer. Some have theorized that it is because back in the day, the scoring of a rouge was signaled with a red flag.

Of course, the CFL has always been a distant — very distant — cousin to the NFL. They have their own set of rules: a larger and wider field and end zone, three downs, just eight teams and the aforementioned one-point scoring play that leads to strange endings to games like this one.

From 1950 to 1961, the two leagues actually organized preseason exhibition games in Canada. Because of the differences in the game play, games were played with one half devoted to the Canadian rules, and the American rules for the other thirty minutes.

Because this is the internet, all the results of these matchups are well-documented here. To no one’s surprise, the NFL dominated these games, with the exception of a 1961 game between the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Buffalo Bills, which Hamilton won 38-21.

In a game recap for the Hamilton Spectator, reporter Gary Lautens wrote this:

This hasn’t been good week the Americans. There was that Russian space flight and Miss Supertest’s victory over the best speedboat the Yanks had to offer and that report of a rift in Frank Sinatra’s clan and then, last night, the one-sided defeat at the Buffalo Bills at the hands of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats on the football field. All that’s needed for complete disaster is news of Liz Taylor’s defection to Nasser.

Of course, even when you go back half a century to talk football history, it ends with the Bills as the laughingstock of it all.

Some things never change.

Posted on 17 October, 2012

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