Vanier Cup tickets moving slowly, but …

The good news for those organizing next month’s Vanier Cup in Hamilton is ticket sales are way ahead of where they were last year at this point.

The bad news? That bar is pretty low.

As of Thursday morning, 3,421 tickets had been sold for the Nov. 25 national university football championship. Capacity for the game at Tim Hortons Field is 13,195. Last year’s attendance in Hamilton was estimated at fewer than 5,000, which was an all-time low for the event.

“That tells me there’s progress,” says U Sports CEO Graham Brown. “But we’re not necessarily going to sell out.”

Let’s start with the down side of that quote. This is the organization’s most-conspicuous national championship. Empty seats look lousy on TV and send all kinds of unfortunate messages to those checking it out. Particularly when a casual fan flips the dial that Saturday afternoon and sees Ohio State playing at Michigan in front of 110,000 rabid fans.

It’s happened before. Last year’s game was terrific, but the crowd was awful.

“With no fans in the stands, the players have a s----y Vanier Cup,” Brown says.

It’s caused him to ponder whether it would be better to simply give the championship game to Laval every year, since the Quebec school seems to have no difficulty filling its stadium for the event.

Yes, it helps that the hometown Rouge et Or or the nearby Montreal Carabins are in the game nearly all the time. Still, a full house is a full house. Plus, the immense amount of time and effort going into selling this year’s game would be removed if it found residence in Quebec. Brown says if it was at Laval he’d simply have to take a call each week telling him how many more thousands of seats have been sold, rather than put in a ton of work and a significant amount of advertising to make it fly elsewhere.

Of course, there are 26 other schools in the country playing football and they almost certainly would be unhappy with any plan that gave Laval — already a powerhouse — a massive, perpetual recruiting advantage.

So the question remains about how to make it work. A permanent home? Attaching it to the Grey Cup, which worked so well in 2011 and 2012 when Mac played in B.C. and Toronto in front of a combined 62,000 fans? Something else?

Despite not having those answers yet, Brown insists he’s remaining optimistic about ticket sales for this year’s contest. And there’s legitimate reason to believe he may have solid cause for that.

The matchups for the national semifinals

operate on a rotation, so the path to the championship requires each of the Atlantic, Ontario, Quebec and West winners to face a champion from a different conference each year. This season, the rotation has Ontario facing Atlantic.

This is significant, because those who’ve faced the east-coast champs have advanced — usually handily — in each of the past nine years. And with McMaster, Western, Laurier and Guelph all ranked in the top 10 in the country, they’d all be heavily favoured to win a semifinal if they got there. That would almost certainly lead to a sudden surge of ticket-buying by one school’s community in the week leading up to the game, since all have an easy drive to Hamilton.

Brown says U Sports research shows 85 per cent of ticket sales for Vanier Cups over the past decade have come from buyers located within 75 kilometres of the venue. McMaster, Laurier, Guelph and Waterloo (which is just outside the top 10) meet that criteria. Western is a little further away, but most expect its fans would travel.

For that reason, he says folks within that radius — including here in Hamilton — will begin to see heavier advertising soon.

“I want the best two teams,” Brown says. “My marketing department wants any of four teams that are within 75 kilometres.”

There’s a very good chance they’ll get that wish. At which point we’ll all see if proximity is indeed one of the keys to making the Vanier Cup a success.