Top football officials look to create national championship weekend
Summit recommends aligning Grey Cup with Vanier Cup and Canadian Bowl
They're not going to drop the ball this time.
Officials with the gridiron game's major stakeholders met for a total of 15 hours in October — they called it the Canadian Football Summit — and generated five action items, topped by a recommendation to align the Grey Cup, Vanier Cup and Canadian Bowl into a national championship weekend.
If the utopian mash-up of professional, university and junior football championships never comes together, it won't be for lack of follow through.
“There have been other summits before that generated all kinds of recommendations, then everybody goes their separate ways and nothing gets done,” said Football Canada president Jim Mullin, the driving force behind the summit. “So the key part is that we created a place for these national members to be (Football Canada) associate members and to sit on a council and continue to discuss and develop these issues.”
That council, which now includes the Canadian Football League, Canadian Junior Football League, U Sports and Canadian Football Officials Association, will convene at least three times a year, before each of Football Canada's general meetings.
“So we can have followup action on all of these issues,” said Mullin.
That level of continuing communication is key, but it doesn't guarantee success on their topline item of a national championship weekend.
The natural conclusions of junior, university and CFL seasons don't align. While there is apparently an appetite for the CJFL to delay the Canadian Bowl by a fortnight to be staged during Grey Cup week, there's more complexity to the U Sports calendar. Training camps would open a week earlier, meaning student athletes could lose a week of summer job wages. The season openers would be played without students on campus.
“There are some schedule challenges,” said Mullin. “It's pretty hard to take 27 teams and four conferences and thousands of athletes and move their season a week back, or even two weeks
back, in some cases.”
So there are hurdles. There are also alternatives.
“The Vanier Cup could work with the Canadian Bowl to create a football festival at the end of the year on a weekend, and do so with a robust broadcast platform built around it,” said Mullin.
“I think the CFL has a potential role to play in this, even if those schedules aren't aligned. There is a great possibility for a Grey Cup city to hold something like this football festival a year prior. It would be a great test and a runthrough, kind of a mini footprint for a festival. And it would be a revenue generator for the CFL team and for the amateur groups, and it's something that would definitely be broadcast friendly. On those levels, that can work, as well.”
A CFL spokesperson said the league has been working on aligning the Grey Cup and Vanier Cup for some time, and while they're also interested in alignment with the Canadian Bowl, they're not as far down that path.
“Our role at Football Canada is to bring those people together,” said Mullin. “I think the role of the individual organizations is to figure out how this works business-wise. They're driving the bus on this.
“So, in regard to doing something that brings the football country together, there are a couple of paths to this. And this is where we need that council in place, so we have further discussion and development. We want to see the best conclusion to the championships that we have and amplify them as much as possible.”
There is a willingness to work together, a vehicle to get that work done, and strength in their numbers. There is also some potential momentum behind packaging up to nine amateur events and building a broadcast consortium around them. They would include the Canada Cup, a Four Nations tournament, the Vanier Cup, the Canadian Bowl, perhaps the East-west Bowl, and potentially an annual game — the World Junior Bowl — between Canadian and Mexican under-25 players each December in Mexico. The latter event is currently being developed.
“What it allows us to do is take the (event) inventory and sell that inventory as an offering in the marketplace for those who want to support amateur football,” said Mullin, who sees TV exposure for the game as the gateway to more participation at the grassroots level for players, officials and coaches.
“We have to get on those platforms, get the message out about what we do for programming. We've got to have that broadcast presence, with a supporting streaming presence.”
The stakeholders will continue to hold monthly Canadian football summit meetings in 2021, and will focus in January on how to strengthen football at the high school level.
It's pretty hard to take 27 teams and four conferences and thousands of athletes and move their season a week back.