Grey Cup
The Grey Cup is both the championship game of the Canadian Football League and the trophy awarded to the victorious team playing in the namesake championship of professional Canadian football. The game is contested between the winners of the CFL's East and West divisional playoffs and is one of Canadian television's largest annual sporting events. Since 2022, the game has been held on the third Sunday of November and following Remembrance Day. The Toronto Argonauts have the most Grey Cup wins since its introduction in 1909, while the Edmonton Elks have the most Grey Cup wins since the merger in 1958. The latest, the 112th Grey Cup, took place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on November 16, 2025, when the Saskatchewan Roughriders defeated the Montreal Alouettes 25–17.
The Grey Cup is Canada's largest annual sports and television event, regularly drawing a Canadian viewing audience of about 4 million. Two awards are given for play in the game: the Most Valuable Player and the Dick Suderman Trophy as the most valuable Canadian player. In 2019, Andrew Harris was the first player to win both the Grey Cup's Most Valuable Canadian and Most Valuable Player the same year, playing for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
The trophy was commissioned in 1909 by The Earl Grey, then Canada's governor general, who originally hoped to donate it for the country's senior amateur hockey championship. After the Allan Cup was donated for that purpose, Grey instead made his trophy available to the winner of the Canadian Dominion Football Championship, the national championship of Canadian football. The trophy has a silver chalice attached to a large base on which the names of all winning teams, players and executives are engraved. The Grey Cup has been broken on several occasions, stolen twice, and held for ransom. It survived a 1947 fire that destroyed numerous artifacts housed in the same building.
The Grey Cup was first won by the Toronto Varsity Blues of the University of Toronto. Play was suspended from 1916 to 1918 due to the First World War and in 1919 due to a rules dispute. The game has typically been contested in an east-versus-west format since the 1920s. The game was always played on a Saturday until 1968, but since 1969 has always been on a Sunday. Held in late November, and mostly in outdoor stadiums, the Grey Cup has been played in inclement weather at times, including the 1950 "Mud Bowl", in which a player reportedly came close to drowning in a puddle, then the 1962 "Fog Bowl", when the final minutes of the game had to be postponed to the following day due to a heavy fog, and the 1977 "Ice Bowl", contested on the frozen-over artificial turf at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. Most recently, in the 2017 game snow fell, at times heavily, throughout the game.
The then-Edmonton Eskimos formed the Grey Cup's longest dynasty, winning five consecutive championships from 1978 to 1982. Competition for the trophy has been exclusively between Canadian teams, except for a three-year period from 1993 to 1995, when an expansion of the CFL south into the United States resulted in the Baltimore Stallions winning the 1995 championship and taking the Grey Cup south of the border for the only time in its history.
History
National championships before 1909
Serious efforts to organize a national governing body and eventually a Dominion championship for what at that time was still a game called and practically identical to rugby union began in the early 1880s, culminating in the creation of the Canadian Rugby Union in 1891 and the first CRU-recognized national championship the following year. After that, national championship games were held every year prior to the creation of the Grey Cup except 1899, 1903 and 1904.Creation and early years (1909–1921)
While the Stanley Cup was created in 1893 as the Canadian amateur hockey championship, professional teams were openly competing for the trophy by 1907. Albert Grey, 4th Earl Grey, the Governor General of Canada, planned to donate a new trophy to serve as the senior amateur championship; however, Sir Montague Allan donated the Allan Cup before he could finalize his plans. Grey instead offered an award for the Canadian amateur rugby football championship beginning in 1909. He initially failed to follow through on his offer; the trophy was not ordered until two weeks prior to the first championship game.The first Grey Cup game was held on December 4, 1909, between two Toronto clubs: the University of Toronto Varsity Blues defeated the Parkdale Canoe Club 26–6 before 3,800 fans. The trophy was not ready for presentation following the game, and the Varsity Blues did not receive it until March 1910. They retained the trophy in the following two years, defeating the Hamilton Tigers in 1910 and the Toronto Argonauts in 1911. The University of Toronto failed to reach the 1912 Grey Cup, which was won by the Hamilton Alerts over the Argonauts. The Varsity Blues refused to hand over the trophy on the belief they could keep it until they were defeated in a title game. They kept the trophy until 1914 when they were defeated by the Argonauts, who made the trophy available to subsequent champions.
Canada's participation in World War I resulted in the cancellation of the championship from 1916 to 1918, during which time the Cup was forgotten. The Montreal Gazette claimed that the trophy was later rediscovered as "one of the family heirlooms" of an employee of the Toronto trust company where it had been sent for storage. The Grey Cup game was also cancelled in 1919 due to a lack of interest from the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the intercollegiate unions, along with rules conflicts between the Canadian Rugby Union and the western union; Canada was still struggling in its recovery from the Spanish flu epidemic that occurred during the last months of World War I. Competition finally resumed in 1920 with the 8th Grey Cup game, won 16–3 by the Varsity Blues over the Argonauts. It was the University of Toronto's fourth, and final, championship.
Western participation (1922–1932)
Competition for the Grey Cup was limited to member unions of the CRU, the champions of which petitioned the league body for the right to challenge for the national championship. The Western Canada Rugby Football Union was formed in 1911, but the CRU did not come to a participation agreement with it until 1921, allowing the Edmonton Eskimos of the WCRFU to challenge. Facing the Argonauts in the 9th Grey Cup, the Eskimos became the first western teamand the first from outside Toronto or Hamiltonto compete for the trophy. The Argonauts entered the game with an undefeated record, having outscored their opposition 226 to 55 during the season. They dominated Edmonton, recording the first shutout in Grey Cup history with a 23–0 victory. Multi-sport star Lionel Conacher was Toronto's top player, scoring 15 of his team's points before leaving the game after the third quarter to join his hockey team for their game. The same Edmonton team challenged for the trophy again in 1922, but lost 13–1 to their eastern opposition, the Queen's University Golden Gaels. For Queen's, it was the first of three consecutive titles.Western teams continued to vie for the trophy, but were consistently outclassed for several years. Eastern teams and critics felt the quality of the western game was inferior to theirs, and when Queen's defeated the Regina Rugby Club 54–0 in the 1923 final, the critics felt they deliberately ran up the score to prove that point. Regina was western Canada's dominant team, appearing in the Grey Cup on six occasions between 1928 and 1934, but lost to their eastern opponents each time. Regina helped revolutionize Canadian football in 1929, however, as they attempted the first forward pass in Grey Cup history. The Winnipeg 'Pegs became the first western Grey Cup champion in 1935 when they defeated the Hamilton Tigers, 18–12. While the Grey Cup was slow to achieve national popularity, the advent of the east versus west format helped make the game the nation's largest sporting event.
Progress towards professionalism (1933–1956)
As the quality of senior football improved, university teams realized they were no longer able to compete on equal footing and withdrew from competition for the Grey Cup in 1933. By 1938, only three unions continued to compete under the banner of the CRU: the IRFU and the Ontario Rugby Football Union in the east, and the Western Interprovincial Football Union in the west. The CRU experimented with a two-game, total points series to determine the champion in 1940. The Ottawa Rough Riders won both games against Toronto's Balmy Beach, 8–2 and 12–5. The Grey Cup returned to its one-game format the following year.Both the Big Four and WIFU suspended operations in 1942 due to the Second World War. Grey Cup play was expected to be suspended along with the unions; however, the military felt the game and sport would serve as a morale booster and organized teams at bases across the country. For the following three years, Grey Cup competition was limited to military teams, and in the 1942 Grey Cup, the Toronto RCAF Hurricanes defeated the Winnipeg RCAF Bombers 8–5 to become the first non-civilian team to win the national championship. Two years later, the St. Hyacinthe–Donnacona Navy defeated the Hamilton Flying Wildcats, 7–6; no Grey Cup championship since then has featured two eastern teams. The conclusion of the war led to the reformation of civilian teams; the Big Four resumed play in 1945, and the WIFU the following year.
A push by the sport's organizers to adopt an increasingly professional attitude dominated the post-war period: poor field conditions, previously accepted as part of the game, resulted in numerous complaints against the CRU following the 1949 and 1950 Grey Cups. Field conditions at Toronto's Varsity Stadium were so poor in 1950 that the game has since gained infamy as the "Mud Bowl". Deep ruts in the field and poor weather in the days leading up to the game resulted in a sloppy field covered in large puddles of water. The game also gained notoriety for the near drowning of Winnipeg's Buddy Tinsley, who was found face down in a large puddle, apparently unconscious. Tinsley later said that he had not lost consciousness, but his leg had gone numb from a hard hit to a preexisting injury. Toronto won the game 13–0, the last time a team has been shut out in a Grey Cup game.
File:1956 Grey Cup victory.jpg|thumb|Don Getty, future Premier of Alberta, celebrates with the Grey Cup after the Eskimos' 1956 championship.|alt=A man with short hair in a white football uniform drinks out of a large silver cup.
The ORFU, the last purely amateur union competing for the Grey Cup, withdrew from Cup competition in 1954. Although the Big Four and WIFU champions had faced each other in the Grey Cup final since 1945, the ORFU's withdrawal left the IRFU and WIFU unchallenged as Canada's top football unions. The Eskimos faced the Montreal Alouettes in three consecutive Grey Cups in the mid-1950s, winning all three. Edmonton's first title in 1954 ended in bizarre fashion after Jackie Parker scored a touchdown from a fumble recovery late in the game that gave Edmonton a 26–25 lead. At the time in Canadian football, touchdowns were only worth 5 points. Parker's 90-yard fumble return was the longest in league history until Toronto's Cassius Vaughn returned a Calgary fumble 109 yards in the 2017 Grey Cup game which was won by Toronto. The 1954 game also marked the end of the amateur era as the top teams completed their transition to professional organizations.
As the 1950s wore on, the Big Four and WIFU distanced themselves from the CRU, forming the Canadian Football Council in 1956 to administer the game at the professional level. Two years later, on January 18, 1958, the CFC withdrew from the CRU and the Big Four & WIFU merged into the Canadian Football League. The new league formally assumed control of the Grey Cup from the CRU.