U Sports football has never been better. So why has the Vanier Cup struggled to find an audience?

The ad appears halfway through the sports section of the Toronto Star on Nov. 16, 1993, splashy white letters against a backdrop of black ink in the bottom-left quadrant of the broadsheet newspaper page. 

If Joe Carter’s walk-off home run to clinch the World Series three weeks earlier provided the climax to Toronto’s year in sports, then the Vanier Cup, scheduled for Nov. 20 that year, and featuring a showdown between the University of Calgary Dinos and the resurgent University of Toronto, with a national title at stake, shaped up as a thrilling encore.

And if the prospect of watching the Varsity Blues, a program that, 12 months earlier, had been targeted for cancellation as a U of T cost-cutting measure, complete an improbable run to the national title didn’t motivate you to call Ticketmaster, maybe some of the game-day bonuses, all detailed in the advertisement, would do it.

Maybe it was the halftime show.

Or the post-game reception.

Or the raffle for a brand-new 1994 Geo Tracker, the kind of pocket-sized SUV that gained popularity in the mid-1990s.

If none of those perks could lure you to the then-named SkyDome, perhaps ticket costs would make the difference. Where World Series seats in the Dome’s 100-level retailed for $67, the Vanier Cup sold tickets at three price points: $10.50, $15.50 and $25.50. 

Those figures seem comically low until you run them through an inflation calculator. In 2025 dollars, the cheapest seat would cost $20.21, the mid-priced one would sell for $29.83, and premium seats would cost $49.07.

WATCH | The story of the 1993 U of T Blues:

And those numbers make prices for this year’s Vanier Cup, scheduled for this Saturday at Mosaic Stadium in Regina, Sask. (CBC, Gem, CBCSports.ca, 3 p.m. EST), and pitting the Saskatchewan Huskies against the University of Montreal Carabins, look like even more of a bargain. In real dollars, tickets to this year’s national championship game – priced at $11.12 and $21.47 – cost roughly half what they did three decades ago.

To an optimist, those super affordable tickets underscore the Vanier Cup’s status as a marquee sports event that provides unmatched dollar-for-dollar value. By contrast, single game, regular-season tickets for Saskatchewan Roughriders games at Mosaic Stadium started at $39.99.

But we can also read those ticket prices as a longer-term devaluation of Canadian university football in a changing sports marketplace. By some metrics, the on-field product is stronger than ever. More than 150 U Sports alumni opened the 2025 season on CFL rosters, while six current NFL players either started or finished their university careers in U Sports programs. But even with high-level talent and a fan-friendly cost of admission, Vanier Cup attendance hasn’t exceeded 15,000 since 2014.

As the Vanier Cup enters its seventh decade, a nagging question still hangs over U Sports’ marquee event: Is this Canadian cultural institution equipped to stay relevant amid a changing sports media environment and changing consumer habits?

U Sports CEO Pierre Arsenault sees this Saturday as a chance to rebound, with Vanier Cup Week making its Regina debut, and following closely behind the Roughriders Grey Cup parade, while the matchup is essentially a home game for the Saskatoon-based Huskies.

“We’ve really been looking forward to bringing it to such a football-rich province,” Arsenault said of this year’s game. “The driving force for us is, what is the best student-athlete experience, and who do we build engagement and support for our product?”

The energy and the atmosphere of that day, in SkyDome, with 29,000 people in the stands, with the national title at stake, elevated us to an optimal level.– Former Queen's Golden Gael Brad Elberg

After three quarters, 123 rushing yards, and three touchdowns, in a game his Queen’s University Golden Gaels would eventually win 31-0, Brad Elberg jogged off the field one more time, content to spend the final moments of his last university game on the bench. As his team finished off the St. Mary’s Huskies, Elberg, who would parlay his breakout 1992 season into a training camp invite from the Philadelphia Eagles, dealt with the final two items on his Vanier Cup to-do list: collecting his MVP trophy and finding his parents in the stands at SkyDome.

The award would have to wait until after the game, but when Elberg turned his back to the field he quickly spotted his dad, Bob, and mom, Sharon. They were seated directly behind the Golden Gaels’ bench, about 20 rows up, and waved to their son the moment he made eye contact.

Elberg’s lasting other memory about the audience that afternoon?

The way the crowd, thick with Queen’s alumni, functioned like a 13th player, helping inspire a strong team to a blowout win. Queen’s campus is in Kingston, Ont., about three hours east of downtown Toronto, but it felt like a supercharged home game to Elberg and the Golden Gaels.

“The energy and the atmosphere of that day, in SkyDome, with 29,000 people in the stands, with the national title at stake, elevated us to an optimal level,” said Elberg, a Regina native who plans to attend this year’s game. “I’m not sure there was a guy on that time who had played a better game than they did that day.”

After 24 years at Varsity Stadium, the Vanier Cup moved to SkyDome in 1989, and in those early years at its new home, large, loud crowds were as much a part of the game as the trophy itself. The 1989 game saw the Western Mustangs trounce the Saskatchewan Huskies 35-10, and drew a then-record 32,847 spectators. For the next three Novembers, crowd size hovered above 26,000. 

In 1993 attendance dipped to 20,211, but the Varsity Blues and Calgary Dinos delivered an instant classic. The decisive play came on the final snap, with U of T’s John Raposo blocking a Calgary field goal attempt to preserve Toronto’s 37-34 lead. But the play that would go viral in today’s sports and social media environment came when UofT’s all-conference return man, Glenn McCausland, scooped up a punt he had fumbled, then rocketed 81 yards for a touchdown.

“It was just an amazing team effort,” McCausland said in a recent interview. “For us, at SkyDome, the crowd was more than anything we’d been accustomed to. The atmosphere was electric.”

Attendance the following two years averaged 28,915, as the Vanier Cup leveraged its marketing advantages. It was a recognizable annual event at a sexy new setting in the country’s biggest media market. And unlike Division 1 NCAA football’s blizzard of bowl games and rankings, it delivered an unambiguous, undisputed national champion every year.

“It’s like pushing a big rock,” said Vanier Cup general manager Jim Calder, in a 1992 Toronto Star story about the game’s steady growth in popularity. “Once you get it rolling, it gains a momentum all its own.”

But after the 1995 game, which drew 29,178, the Vanier Cup wouldn’t eclipse 20,000 spectators again until 2007. A low point came in 1997, when a UBC-Ottawa matchup drew just 8,184 people, the smallest Vanier Cup crowd since the inaugural event in 1965, when 3,488 souls endured single-digit temperatures on drizzly afternoon to watch U of T defeat Alberta 14-7.

The Vanier Cup’s exclusive engagement in Toronto ended in 2003, and since then the game has traveled to 10 different venues, including BC Place in Vancouver, back to the dome, now called Rogers Centre , and a pair of lacklustre years at Tim Horton’s Field in Hamilton.

But Arsenault stresses that opening up the Vanier Cup to competing bids brings it in line with the rest of U Sports’ championship lineup, while making the annual event a truly national showcase.

“We’ve been on a run,” Arsenault said, in praising successful bids from Regina and Quebec City in recent years. “As we’ve brought the game to new communities, the response has really been special.”

Some years, the setup works wonderfully. In 2014, nearly 23,000 spectators gathered at Percival Molson Stadium in Montreal to watch the University of Montreal’s 20-19 win over McMaster. 

But the current arrangement also risks a disconnect between host city and competing teams. When Western played Saskatchewan in the 2021 Vanier Cup, only 5,840 people showed up at Stade Telus in Quebec City.

“If the question is driven by attendance numbers, I think there’s more to it than a decline in pageantry and the interest,” said Elberg, now a lawyer who lives in Toronto. “I think it’s circumstances.”

Still, if we plotted 20 years worth of Vanier Cup attendance on a line graph, we would see spikes. There’s the 2007 game in Toronto, and another in 2011, when 24,935 people came to B.C. Place to watch McMaster’s 41-39, two-overtime win over Laval. A reported 665,000 people also watched that matchup on TSN. In 2012, the McMaster-Laval rematch attracted a record 37,098 spectators to Rogers Centre, with another 910,000 tuning in on TSN and RDS.

The thread connecting those three games?

All were part of the Vanier Cup’s on-again-off-again partnership with the CFL’s Grey Cup, with both games in the same stadium, on the same weekend, with the university championship serving as the co-feature the pro game’s main event. The advantages are clear – media and fan attention on the Grey Cup is the rising tide that also lifts the Vanier Cup’s boat. And in years that both games feature a team from the same market, like 2007, when the University of Manitoba and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers both played for titles, the crossover appeal is amplified.

Renewing that alliance, says sports business consultant Vijay Setlur, represents a clear path back to the spotlight for the Vanier Cup.

“Combine the two games into one weekend and turn the games into a larger, all-encompasing festival,” said Setlur, a sports marketing instructor at York University’s Schulich School of Business. “Maybe have a film festival around it.. It would elevate both. The host city would be the epicentre for football.” 

For his part, Arsenault says U Sports is open to rekindling its partnership with the CFL in the future, but obstacles remain.

First, the schedules are misaligned. This year’s Vanier Cup is taking place a week after the Grey Cup. Next year’s Grey Cup is slated for Nov. 15 in Calgary; the Vanier Cup will take place 13 days later in Quebec City. Putting the two championship games back in sync would likely mean moving U Sports football’s start date to mid-August, Arsenault said.

Then there are the rule changes.

Beginning in 2027 the CFL will alter the size of its playing surface. The distance between goal lines will shrink to 100 yards from 110, the standard field length at all levels of the game in Canada. New rules will also trim end zones to 15 yards, down from their current 20-yard depth. And goal posts will move from the front of the end zone to the back.

Arsenault hasn’t ruled out U Sports adopting those rule changes eventually, but points out re-sizing gridirons and adorning them with new lines will require costly changes to stadium infrastructure. Teams that have recently resurfaced their fields might not want to renovate them again for a few years.

For the immediate term, he says the Vanier Cup benefits from sole possession of the game week spotlight in its host city.

“We’re building the ability that, regardless of where the game is, people want to travel,” Arsenault said. “As a stand-alone event, we get to be the show in town.”

Patchwork of regional broadcasts

The 2014 edition of the Vanier Cup wasn’t just notable for the over-capacity crowd at Molson Stadium, or for Montreal’s dramatic comeback, scoring twice in the final quarter to win by a single point. That game was also the first to take place after regular season U Sports football vanished from TV screens in Ontario.

By then, TSN had ceased national broadcasts of regular season games, and OUA football, a Saturday afternoon staple on Hamilton’s CHCH in the 1980s and 1990s, had moved to The Score, which would later become Sportsnet 360. But Sportsnet declined to renew its OUA partnership ahead of the 2014 season, its leadership reasoning that the average audience size – 28,000 viewers – didn’t justify the steep cost of producing games each week.

For Sportsnet, it was a math problem. 

In a 2014 interview with the Toronto Star, Scott Moore, then Sportsnet’s president, explained that adding up the cost of rights and production for a pro sports broadcast, then dividing by the number of people watching, worked out to a cost of less than 10 cents per viewer. That same formula, applied to OUA football broadcasts, equalled $3 per viewer – unsustainable numbers for Moore.

“We believe in student-athletes,” Moore said at the time. “But at some point you’ve got to go where the viewers are.”

In place of weekly national regular season broadcasts, a patchwork of regional alternatives has emerged. RSEQ games appear both online and on linear TV in Quebec, while other conferences offer a variety of subscription and a la carte streaming services. The arrangement serves hardcore fans who are already inclined to seek out and pay for U Sports football streams, but doesn’t address casual and drive-by fans, or provide the kind of national platform that past generations of Vanier Cup protagonists enjoyed in the leadup to the title game.

In the absence of a consistent regular-season presence on linear TV, Arsenault stresses the need for U Sports football programs to meet younger audiences where they spend most of their time.

On the internet.

“Information moves so much more quickly, and … we’re very much trying to be in the middle of it,” he said. “We’re working closely with the conferences and member schoolsvto have people engage all season long, following our U Sports football players and their stories.”

It needs to be reimagined as a product [to] target a broader audience … that’s where festivalization comes in.– Sports consultant Vijay Setlur

So which levers can Vanier Cup stakeholders pull to keep the game on Canadian sports fans’ radars?

For Setlur, it's a question of reimagining and repacking the event, and for an example he points to WWE. Wrestlemania used to be a one-day pay-per-view event, but now it’s a weekend-long wrestling celebration. He envisions a similar future for the Vanier Cup, where the championship game is the culmination of a multi-day festival incorporating football and pop culture, with a strong host-city flavour.

“It needs a facelift,” Setlur said. “It needs to be reimagined as a product (to) target a broader audience … that’s where festivalization comes in.”

Arsenault, meanwhile, stresses the importance of storytelling – introducing teams and players to Canadian sports fans early, and letting plotlines develop all season. To that end, he still identifies a national TV deal as a priority, but acknowledges that U Sports football also needs to gain traction among online sports fans.

“We’re definitely interested in the most amount of reach,” he said. “We would love to have a game of the week on national TV … as we evolve, we’re using all of the available tools that might create just as much success in terms of the ultimate goal, which is access. Knowing our players. Knowing their stories.”

Those early 1990s games in Toronto are a case in point. 

Before Elberg scored those three touchdowns against St. Mary's devoted football fans already knew his backstory. He ran a 4.8-second 40-yard dash in his first year at Queens, but he hit the track and weight room as hard as he hit the books, and by 1992 he had the power to bulldoze defenders and the 4.3-second speed to sprint past them.

And then there’s McCausland, who went from an undersized, overlooked recruit out of Weston C.I. in Toronto, to a key driver in U of T’s transformation from lame-duck football program to national champion. Less than a month after Joe Carter circled the bases to end the World Series, McCausland provided his own iconic Toronto Sports Moment, literally waving goodbye to the Dinos as he sped toward the end zone.

“It happened the same year the Blue Jays won,” he said. “Life’s about memories, so that Vanier Cup will always be front and centre in my mind.”