Canadian Football League
The regular season is 21 weeks long, with games beginning in mid-June and finishing by early November. The CFL's nine current teams are divided into two divisions: the East Division with four teams and the West Division, with five teams. Each team plays two games against each of the other eight teams, plus two divisional games with opponents rotating each season. With 18 regular season games being played, each team gets three bye weeks.
Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada
The Canadian Football League has teams in all seven current NHL markets, in addition to Hamilton, Ontario, and Regina, Saskatchewan. At least eight of these nine markets have hosted CFL teams every year since the league's officially listed inception in 1958, and no other Canadian market has ever had a CFL team of its own. In 2015, the CFL commenced Northern Kickoff, originally slated to be one preseason game and later expanded to a regular season game as well, both of which were played in Fort McMurray, an oil sands boomtown with a metro area population of less than 70,000, the smallest market to host major professional football in the modern era. Fort McMurray is in relatively close proximity to Edmonton, which was expected to boost attendance, but fewer than 5,000 fans attended the regular season game, and no games have been held in the city since (the city was devastated by a wildfire shortly thereafter). Regular season games have been played in Moncton in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2019 to gauge expansion to the Maritime provinces in the Touchdown Atlantic; the expansion team, the Atlantic Schooners, has been proposed twice, once unsuccessfully in the 1980s, and another in the late 2010s that is still being considered. Hamilton, in addition to hosting the 2013 Touchdown Atlantic, played the rest of their 2013 season in Guelph during the construction of Tim Hortons Field.