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Say hello to The 50.29-Metre Line
BURNABY, B.C.—It has come to the attention of the 55-Yard Line offices that two American schools played a NCAA-sanctioned game using metric measurements in 1977. Given the many rule differences that produce wacky only-in-the-CFL moments, we find it unacceptable that it's American schools being weird and quirky by using metric and not our great nation, which of course embraces the metric system in almost everything else. Heck, such wise and universally respected commentators as Sun News Network's David Menzies have suggested boycotting the CFL over its lack of metric measurements. This American aggression shall not stand! Thus, in order to convince Canadian football authorities to alter their preferred measurement nomenclature, we're changing the name of this blog, effective immediately. Here's the new logo, from Ian Denomme:
And some more details on the American encroachment into the metric system, from Deadspin:
On September 17, 1977, Carleton College and St. Olaf College played the Liter Bowl, the first NCAA-sanctioned game to use metric measurements, and probably the dorkiest piece of football ever put together.
Top to bottom, the whole story is unapologetically nerdy. It was dreamt up by a Carleton chemistry professor named Jerry Mohrig. The field was 100 meters long and 50 meters wide (109.36 and 54.68 yards, respectively). There were metric meter lines, metric down-chains, even metric end zones. The ball was 29 centimeters long (within NCAA regulation), but who really knows how big a regular football is.
The SouthernMinn article they cite adds a few remarkable notes:
Fans got fully behind the quirky idea, putting together all kinds of metric-friendly gimmicks to go with the play on the field. They also showed up in numbers upward of 10,000, the most since President Dwight. D. Eisenhower gave a speech on the same field. People wore T-shirts that read, “Drop Back 10 Meters and Punt!”; students donned their uniforms as team “cheer-liters”; ushers worked their way through the stands as “meter maids”; and Sports Illustrated noted the halftime honoring of “General Ulysses S. Gram, skier Jean-Claude Kilo and baseball’s Harmon Kilogram, all figures to reckon with by any standard of measurement.”
Surely Canada can top this, though. After all, a yard is 0.9144 metres, so if we just convert the current CFL dimensions to metric, we get a field that's 101.18 metres long (with 18.3-metre end zones) by 59.44 metres wide. Imagine a towering pocket passer like Edmonton's Jonathan Crompton, who stands a robust 1.93 metres tall, throwing a pass with a 0.71 metre ball while bulky linemen like Matt O'Donnell (who weighs in at 154.22 kilograms) are blocking for him. Moreover, we have a Carleton, too, and they're playing football again! There's such perfect symmetry there that we should convert to this metric system immediately. To the regulation-sized metric barricades, everyone!
*Note: This entire post is quite tongue-in-cheek. Please address complaints to me via e-mail or Twitter.
