Ontario Rugby Football Union

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Ontario Rugby Football Union or ORFU was an early Canadian football league with teams in the Canadian province of Ontario. The ORFU was founded in 1883 and in 1903 became the first major competition to adopt the Burnside Rules, from which the modern Canadian football code would evolve.

Its champions challenged for the Grey Cup in its early decades, but by the 1950s their challenges proved to be perennial failures against the stronger interprovincial leagues, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the Western Interprovincial Football Union. The ORFU withdrew from Grey Cup competition in 1954 in a move that heralded the start of the modern era of Canadian football. By 1974, the ORFU had ceased to exist.