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“It just ended up being a thing,” said defensive back Rico Murray, wearing Malcolm X glasses with his dreads piled on top of his head in a giant bun. “We looked around and maybe all but two or three of us on the starting lineup had dreads. That was kind of cool.”

The trend toward long hair has forced football officials to lay down rules. Essentially long hair is fair game because it’s deemed part of the player’s equipment, thus the ball-carrier can be pulled down by a tug on his hair.

And just like a player without the ball can’t be held by the jersey, they can’t be held by the hair. But it happens, said Williams.

“I actually cut my hair this year, it was much longer than this,” Woods said, holding up one of his tangled strands. “It was getting pulled so much this year I cut about four inches off.”

The CFL basically adopted the NFL’s hair rule, which was written in 2003 and is affectionately known as the “Ricky Rule” after Ricky Williams. The longtime NFLer, who played the 2006 season with Toronto, has worn dreads since his college days with the Texas Longhorns.

Perhaps the most famous football hair incident happened in 2013, when Jacksonville’s Jason Babin tackled Arizona running back Andre Ellington, yanking out a handful of his hair in the process. There was no flag on the play.

Argos cornerback Akwasi Owusu-Ansah hasn’t cut his hair since 2011, in his rookie season with the Dallas Cowboys. His inspiration?

“Honestly the inspiration for most American players was Ricky Williams,” Owusu-Ansah said. “He was the first sweet player who had locks, and it just looked so sweet coming out of the helmet, and literally I’ll tell you, that was the inspiration for like 95 per cent of players, just the way it looked.