Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada
The Canadian Football League is the highest level of play in Canadian football. The league was organized in 1956 as a cooperative agreement between two regional leagues, the Big Four (which dated to 1907) and the WIFU (which was founded in 1936), and became independent from Football Canada in 1958. The league now consists of nine teams, all based in Canada. The Grey Cup is awarded annually to the champion every November and is the highest attended sporting event in the nation. The oldest extant teams, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Toronto Argonauts, trace their origins to the late 1860s and early 1870s, which ranks them amongst the oldest professional sports teams of any kind still in existence on the continent. The CFL attempted an expansion into the United States in cities that had no NFL team between 1993 and 1995, though the expansion teams all either folded or relocated to Canadian cities.
Playoff format
Like the NFL, the Canadian Football League also uses one game playoffs, and has used them almost exclusively since the 1973 season. In the CFL, six teams qualify for the playoffs, divided into two divisional brackets of three teams each. The second place teams in each division host the Division Semi-Final, while the division winners each receive a bye to the Division Final. The Division Final winners play in the Grey Cup. Unlike the NFL, divisional playoffs have been a regular fixture in professional Canadian football since the 1930s. The main rationale for their introduction was that Canadian football clubs were (and, to a considerable extent, still are) more heavily dependent on a steady stream of gate receipts compared to their NFL counterparts, largely due to their playing in relatively small markets and smaller stadiums compared to NFL teams. A more inclusive playoff structure was therefore seen as necessary to ensure as many games as possible up to the end of the season were "meaningful" so as to encourage fans to attend games.