All-Canadian Football weekend---Vanier Cup Saturday, Grey Cup on Sunday

There may be only a handful of Canadians here who care about the Vanier Cup (Canadian university football championship) but this one should be a barn burner: Queen's Gaels vs Calgary Dinos in Quebec City (Hey, Laval, what happened?)

Game will feature Gaels' QB Danny Brannagan (second all time passer in CIS history) and Dinos QB Eric Glavic, two time Hec Crichton winner and the first in history to win it with two different teams (suck it up, St. Mary's).

And Sunday, it's the Grey Cup in Calgary with 40,000 Green Rider fans and oh, five, Als fans.

Bruce Dowbiggin has a column on why the Grey Cup still resonates with Canadians and points out some astonishing TV numbers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/canadians-still-love-to-watch-the-grey-cup/article1379563/

As it turns out, it's because everybody hates Toronto.

Toronto is always invited to this party - welcomed in fact - but Canada's largest city is more like the guy in the corner looking for his keys. Virtually all the other teams have a defining presence at the game - Riderville, The Spirit of Edmonton and Winnipeg, Tigertown, Calgary's flapjacks and horses. Heck, there is even a presence from the Maritimes and Baltimore, and they haven't got teams. But Toronto is more like the designated driver of the Grey Cup.

And check out the TV numbers over the years:

A few facts on the resilience of the Grey Cup: The 1981 game attracted 6.2 million viewers - two million more than Super Bowl XV. The 1982 Grey Cup game attracted the largest television audience in the history of Canadian television with 7,862,000 viewers. Only the series finale for M*A*S*H topped the 1983 Grey Cup ratings.

Als are 9 1/2 point favourites and as much as I think Anthony Cavillo is a great QB with a distinguished career, I'm cheering on the Canadian corps of Roughrider receivers---dubbed the Slow, White Canadians.

 

FH, interesting factoid: Anthony Cavillo broke into the CFL in '94 with the Las Vegas Posse.

 

Dowbiggin typically gets his facts wrong.

Gold-medal game of 2002 drew more than 10 million

 

Never stopped Bruce before.

I knew it was high, but that high? Wow. That's almost 1/3 of the entiire population.

Just think what the numbers will be if Canada makes it to the Gold Medal game in Vancouver. The country will shut down.

 

It's poorly worded, but I expect he means "at the time". Especially since he references an 8 million number in the next paragraph.

 

I still believe Game 8 of the Summit Series in 1972 is probably the most watched event in Canadian television history, sports or otherwise - if not in aggregate numbers, then certainly in percentage of viewers.

 

Rider Nation storms Calgary......and cleans the city out of watermelons. Thousands more melons are being rushed to Calgary to fill the demand.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Rider+Nation+Sparks+Watermelon+Frenzy/2275152/story.html



The U.S. can have the Super Bowl. There is no football frenzy that compares to the Grey Cup.

 

Will there be anyone left in Saskatchewan on Sunday?

The Yanks could invade, take over the province and no one would notice.

 

Baltimore didn't fold. The team moved to Montreal after the Ravens moved to town. I remember they had decent crowds, but had the silly lawsuit over the Colts name. The Colts, then the CFLs and then the Stallions.

 

CFL expansion into the US was an absolute disaster for a bunch of reasons including incompetent and corrupt ownership.

Larry Smith, the CFL Commish at the time, was a clueless MBA grad who made the same fundamental mistake that hundreds of other Canadian businesses made in a NAFTA world: the assumption that the two countries were essentially the same market, sharing the same cultural values.

One of the most successful businesses in Canada, Canadian Tire, tried to duplicate their weird business model in the US and was a total disaster.

Too bad that Bettman still hasn't realised this

 

or care