How popular is High School & College Football in Canada?

Question

I'm asking about the game in Canadian High Schools and also in Canadian colleges. Also do schools play using the same rules as the CFL?

Answer 1

Canadian High School Football is popular, but only at the local level.  It certainly does not even come close to the popularity of American High School Football though, as the stadiums are very small, but so are the schools..I believe they do follow the Canadian CFL rules.

Answer 2

It's pretty popular, in fact, it's extremely popular in Quebec.

University Football in Canada is modelled more closely to the CFL rules. High school football, especially in smaller schools, is somewhat modified. For example they play on smaller fields, and there can be fewer players per side on the field. 6-man football which is popular in schools in Saskatchewan where I live is a combination of Canadian and American rules

Answer 3

While it's likely that football's popularity varies from region to region in Canada, the way it does in the States (I think that high school football's more popular in Texas and Florida than it would be in New York or Minnesota, isn't it?) I can tell you that overall, football isn't nearly as popular at the high school and university level in Canada as it is down south.

I played high school football in Calgary, one of the biggest cities in the country, and I can tell you that none of the schools we played at had football stadiums the way you see in the States.  Games were played in the school-yards, and the schools that had bleachers weren't big enough to seat very many people.  Not that it mattered, anyways, as my high school team only played in front of friends and family.  We'd also play at a city-owned field with stands and a scoreboard, but even then, fan turnouts were really low.  When my team made it to the city final in my freshman year, we played at McMahon Stadium, home of the Calgary Stampeders, and it was pretty vacant, to say the least.  There were less than 1,000 people there.  In fact, there were probably less than 500.  And this was for a 1,500-student school going up against a 2,600-student school.  So not only was there very little fan support from the student bodies, but there were hardly any outsiders, beyond family and friends, at the game, either.  It's was certainly a far cry from the sold-out Texas Stadium that you see in Friday Night Lights.

As for the university game, while it is fairly popular in certain provinces, (notably Quebec, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia) it doesn't come anywhere close to matching the popularity of U.S. college football.  For one thing, most university football stadiums in Canada don't hold one-tenth as many fans as the major ones do in the States.  And in the cases where a university shares a stadium with a CFL team, (McMahon Stadium in Calgary and Percival Molson in Montreal) it's the pros, not the college team, that bring in the spectators.

In fact, Canadian university football wasn't even televised, with the exception of our playoff/trophy games, until a couple years ago.  And even now, they only show two to three games a month on The Score, Canada's third-tier sports network, although Quebec football powerhouses like Laval and Montreal are often shown on RDS, the French-language sports channel.  So, in conclusion, I'd say that the popularity of the CFL in Canada comes a lot closer to matching the popularity of the NFL in the States than high school and university football up here does to its American counterparts.

(And yes, we do play 3-down, punt-single, no-fair-catch football in high school and university up here.)

Answer 4

Canadian Football is played here.  As far as school games are concerned there's little here that resembles a Texas Friday Night.

Answer 5

a real yawner!