The Great Canadian Ratings Report: U.S. college football final proves worth of CIS game
Chris Zelkovich Eh Game 12 January 2016
Maybe it's time to bury a few myths about college football in Canada -- and we're talking about both the variety played on this side of the border and the one that emanates from south of here.
The myth is that nobody but friends and relatives cares about the Canadian version and that millions of Canadians are more attached to Notre Dame or Ohio State than they are to Wilfrid Laurier or the University of Alberta.
While television ratings aren't the be-all and end-all to proving popularity, they are a pretty good indication of what tickles the fancies of your average viewer. And the ratings indicate that the gap between the two brands of football is pretty minimal.
Take Monday's much-hyped NCAA championship game between Clemson and Alabama. It was a heck of a good football game and kept viewers on the edge of their seats for its entirety, with see-saw leads, spectacular plays and plenty of drama.
The game, won 45-40 by Alabama, averaged 379,000 viewers on TSN -- interestingly down 18 per cent from last year's game. That's not a bad audience, but it was only 68,000 higher than what last November's Vanier Cup game between UBC and Montreal drew on Sportsnet. (Equally interesting, ESPN's broadcast averaged 25.7 million in the U.S., a 23 per cent drop from last year.)
Considering that Monday's game was played in prime time during the post-Christmas lull and the Vanier Cup happened on a Saturday afternoon during the pre-Christmas frenzy, that's pretty much a draw.
In itself, that's amazing considering all the pre-game hype that surrounds the American variety and the fact that excitement is whipped up by all those NCAA games that air on both Canadian and American television. The Canadian game, meanwhile gets next to no hype and scant television time.
Without that kind of build-up, it gets awfully difficult to create an audience. Yet, the CIS game fares well in comparison to the American one.
Taking all of that into account, you really have to wonder how this myth has endured.
Without getting all Sigmund Freud about it, the answer probably lies in our national inferiority complex. Or maybe it has more to do with the higher alcohol content in our beer. Whatever the reason, the time has come to shovel dirt on that myth.
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Can't believe she wasn't even named on the ballot! All she did was win Olympic Gold in 2014, Canadian Champion in 2015, and lost in the 2015 World Championship finals 5-3.
And half of them will probably be sleeping there because cars are stuck in the storm at the entrances to the parking garage.
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