Prince Albert Minor Football President Taras Kachkowski presenting an award to one of his players, Tazmin Smith-Windsor, during the 2024 Kinsmen Sports Dinner. (paNOW Staff/Logan Lehmann)

By Nick Nielsen

Local president shares thoughts on how CFL rule changes could affect minor football

Sep 24, 2025 | 5:11 PM

The CFL announced some changes for future seasons earlier this week, but those changes won’t just affect the CFL. In some locations around the CFL, collegiate level teams play in the same venue, and with one of the changes shortening the field from 110 yards to 100 yards while also reducing the size of the end zones, it likely means that many football fields across the country will have to change their dimensions to allow for similar competition.

While a lot of the critics of the changes have talked about taking away the differences that separate Canadian football from the American game, Prince Albert Minor Football President Taras Kachkowski said that this problem is bigger than just the pro game.

The changes will likely trickle down to the minor football game over the years to come and that puts places like Prince Albert in a tough spot when the renovations to Max Clunie Field were just finished ahead of this football season.

“Trickling down to our level, especially locally, the school board just spent somewhere in the neighborhood of, I believe, $3 million to put artificial turf on Max Clunie Field and resurface the track with the expectation that this field would last probably about twenty-five years, and now all these rules are being instituted by the CFL that inevitably will trickle down to our level. So now how much sooner will the school board be having to spend install a field with the new markings and the new post location? And will there be any help from the CFL with that? I obviously strongly doubt that.”

The changes announced by the CFL will take place in two stages, first in the next season in 2026, and more in 2027.

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Next year, the ‘rouge’ rule will be modified. Teams will no longer be awarded a point for a ball that sails or rolls through the back of the endzone on a punt or a missed kick. Instead, a ‘rouge’ point will be awarded if the ball settles in the end zone after a punt or failed field goal, or if a player carrying the ball on the returning team fails to leave the endzone.

Two more changes in 2026 will also see team benches moved to opposite sides of the field in all stadiums instead of the same side, and an automatic 35-second play clock that starts the moment the previous play ends, replacing the 20-second play clock that is signalled to start by the referees on the field.

The 2027 rule changes will see the field goal posts move to the back of the endzone instead of their current position at the beginning of the endzone, along with reducing the size of the endzones from 20 yards to 15.

Admittedly, Kachkowski is in favour of the rule changes to the ‘rouge’ point after his final game of football ended when he watched a punt fly over his team’s heads and through the endzone to give his opponents the one point lead, but he’s happy to see it’s still staying in the game. While he’s in favour of that change, Kachkowski didn’t like seeing the field goal posts get moved back.

“I don’t think that the posts at the front of the end zone are as big of a player safety issue as a lot of the detractors make it out to be. I mean, yes, there occasionally has been players and officials that have had collisions with the goalposts, but they are padded to minimize potential injury risk, and to my knowledge, I don’t think any injuries have resulted in those occasional contacts with the post, or if there have been, there haven’t been as severe as they probably could be. I guess I just always figured the occasional pass or kick off the goalpost is just one of those quirks of the Canadian game.”

Kachkowski added that the CFL game also helps preserve the original game of football and how it was played. The first game of football was played between the McGill University Redmen in Montreal and Harvard University Crimson in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a set of rules including three downs and the 110 yard length field. It wasn’t until other colleges got involved that the American game shortened the field.

“It was Yale that built a stadium that was built on too small of a parcel of land, was too large a seating capacity and was so poorly planned it didn’t even have public washrooms on it. The resulting size of field was as large as would fit in the plan, and because of Yale’s Ivy League standing, instead of questioning like, ‘why are you doing this?’, everybody just sort of shrugged their shoulders and went along with it and that became the U.S. standard.”

Kachkowski said that the coaches for Prince Albert Minor Football have gotten together to talk about how these rule changes could affect minor football in the future, but the pattern they have seen with previous changes is usually around five years before it reaches this level. If that is the case, Prince Albert Minor Football, high school football, and other similar programs will have to fall in line as well.

“We’re governed by Football Saskatchewan, and in turn they’re governed by Football Canada. So whatever decisions those two bodies make in regards to the rules, obviously we’ll have to follow. But I haven’t heard anything as far as official communication about that within the last few days, and I don’t expect to hear too much of anything. We’re kind of the bottom rung, so we just basically do whatever the governing bodies above us, tell us to.”

Kachkowski added that the one positive out of the CFL rule changes is that the new modified field should fit within soccer stadiums, unlike the 110 yard long field. That would allow for leagues like the CFL to possibly expand into new markets with existing stadiums easier.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com