It continues to surprise me how U Sports continues to exist on the extreme edges. 70 years ago, the University of Toronto football team had higher average attendance than the NFL (although not by much). Now they're lucky to get 1,000 people to a game and most people in Toronto don't know they even exist. It's shocking how the sport blossomed in the United States yet fell off a cliff in Canada.

The 2 countries are so similar but there are a few areas where things are massively different. Maybe this will lie dormant for many decades still then finally grow into something that mirrors what we see state side.

If the University students don't care enough to support their school's team, I'm not sure why everyone else should care.

At this point I wonder if they should just have a two week gap between the seminals and the Vanier and flip a coin once the two finalists are known to determine where the game should be played. It could draw a decent crowd if it's a home game for someone.

The Vanier Cup could do well in Winnipeg just based on the novelty factor. Assuming the tickets go in the $25-$50 range and not something stratospheric, I'd expect that the game could draw between 10 to 15 thousand fans. Obviously it would be much higher with the Bisons in it, but even having one of the Sask teams in the game would push attendance over 15,000.

It is kind of sad that U Sports does such a lousy job selling the game.

Who said they should?

I think a big problem has been how lousy and non-existent CIS has put any effort and resources to promoting CIS sports. The television coverage has gone down remarkably over this past decade I have never seen any advertising whatsoever by the UofM or UofW here locally in Winnipeg for Bisons or Wesmen Football, Hockey, Basketball or Volleyball if these programs shut down tomorrow I don't know if many people would even be upset. Yet if you drive 2 or 4 hours down Highway 75 to Grand Forks and Fargo ND the sporting culture for UND and NDSU sports is remarkable and really fun to see.

It is true that Canadian university students need not automatically care about U Sports, but it is still odd for them to care a whole lot about UNLV or Wake Forest instead.

I think the problem would be that U Sports wants it to be played in a venue that looks at least respectable on TV. It isn't going to have that "event" feel if it's played in the vast majority of home fields. You would at the very least need to pick the nearest larger stadium, and if Halifax gets their stuff together, you could at least have a decent regional coverage for that.

Maybe things have changed since my days as a Canadian university student that ended in 2005, but to my recollection, no one really paid all that much attention to university sports of any kind.

When it came to the American stuff, I guess some basketball fans would get into March Madness with their brackets and all, but no one was really a fan... just engaging in more of a fun game with others. Also, some hardcore football guys kept tabs on NCAA football. But beyond that there wasn't much discernible interest in NCAA sports.

The only time you'd see much noticeable interest in the home teams was at playoff time. The University of Manitoba would get at least somewhat excited for football, while the University of Alberta would get excited for hockey. The University of Winnipeg would get excited for basketball since that was (and is) their highest profile sport but the U of W is not a place that cares about sports all that much to begin with despite historically punching well above their weight when it comes to volleyball and basketball.

When it came to sports in university, I think the lingua franca was the NHL as well as football (both CFL and NFL). If you heard about sports, it was generally about the pros.

Watch U Sports Final 8 men's basketball championships
Live coverage continues Sunday at 2:00 p.m. ET
CBC Sports March 04 2020

I posted this earlier but what might be the best kept secret is how CBC is streaming all these sports events like they did in the "olden" days on SportsWeekend. There's tons of stuff there.

Mayor disappointed about cancellation of women's hockey championships
Halifax Mayor Mike Savage says he's disappointed but understands the IIHF's decision
Victoria Walton Halifax Today March 8 2020

On Saturday, the International Ice Hockey Federation announced that the 2020 Women's World Hockey Championships would be cancelled.

The tournament was set to take place in Halifax and Truro beginning March 31.

"It's very disappointing but I think very understandable under the current environment and public health comes first," Savage tells NEWS 95.7.

The HRM Mayor says he wasn't directly involved in the decision, but he found out yesterday before the news was released to the public.

"To the organizers, the fans, it's disappointing but I don't think there was any other decision that could be made," Savage says.

Over the past year-and-a-half, the Mayor says the team behind the tournament has put a lot of work into organizing it.

"The city was really pumped up for it," he says. "The organizing committee and folks like Carrie Cousins at Events East had done a tremendous amount of work. Hockey Canada, Hockey Nova Scotia, a lot of volunteers put a lot of time into this and it would've been an awesome event."

Savage says the tournament will return to Halifax next year in 2021, which was also indicated in a release by the IIHF yesterday.

"In this case, I'm just glad that we're going to have a chance, it looks like, to do the hockey tournament next year and we'll do a great job," he adds.

Although coronavirus hasn't been identified in Nova Scotia yet, the Mayor says lots of preparations are being made in Halifax and around the province.

"I don't think that we've hit the peak of this COVID-19 virus, so everybody has to be particularly careful," says Savage.

In Halifax, no other major events have been cancelled, but international travel is being discouraged.

"People are being very cautious but so far I don't think a huge amount of things have been cancelled," he adds. "But I know a lot of organizations including HRM are taking steps to be ready in the case -- and the likelihood frankly that we will have cases here."

France just cancelled all public gatherings over a 1000 people. Will be telling if NHL and NBA playoffs are played with no fans and if MLB will be affected in April. I also wonder if the Bundesliga and English Premiere league may have to shut er down soon too.

The Carleton Ravens won the U Sport men's basketball championship last night in Ottawa, over Dalhousie. It was the Ravens' 9th championship in the past 10 years. And their record 15th title overall.

Attendance was 4100 at TD Place (Civic Centre) which seats around 10,000 and is the home of the OHL-CHL Ottawa 67's.

From what I gather the event was heavily promoted on social media (saw lots of ads on Facebook) but I dunno about traditional media coverage.

I haven't paid much attention to Ottawa anglo media recently, but from what I can see from searches they barely talked about it in the lead-up to the tournament.

Even today coverage is fairly light except for the odd "Oh yea, BTW Carleton won".

(Nothing really new about that level of coverage, though.)

I saw this too late. Streaming is always a case of out of sight, out of mind for me.

Still basically friends and family. CBC broadcasted the tournement on their GEM streaming site which is nice but TSN/Sportsnet basically had very little presence.

The local Regina radio station was talking to Arash Midani of Sportsnet about the lack of USports coverage. He said it is all about ROI. It is far cheaper to buy the ESPN feed of NCAA games than to send out a crew to a random Canadian University to show the games. In the end its a chicken and egg thing, no interest, no sponsors, no advertising, no coverage. Student and local interest, full stadiums, great atmosphere equal sponsors, advertisers and coverage.

Carleton has played and been very competitive with some of the major basketball powerhouses in the NCAA like Kansas yet no one probably even knows this in the Ottawa market let alone Canada.

There is probably a warning in there for the CFL too.

Though admittedly it's on somewhat safer ground due to a major player (TSN) having invested so much in it as a property, and fan interest even if not spectacular and a bit shaky, is still a proven quantity.

Same here (in regards to the website).

I''m an old time cord cutter and I use Kodi (legally), yes, you can do that and get most content you want :)

I think it would be a good addition for most people and the CBC GEM and CBC Sports addons are great. Every Saturday I look at the CBC Sports addon to see what is going on. You can catch a whole lotta things there like CPL, Rugby 7s, all of the winter sports, and all the hockey in HD on CBC GEM.

Just yesterday I was wondering if anyone had any interest in this and maybe I would start a thread.

I also only learned this morning that the Brier was this weekend. The only reason I heard about it is that my local Radio-Canada morning man is a curling geek. He talked about it himself - it wasn't even part of his sports dude's morning rundown of results from the weekend.

Now this isn't unusual because francophone media don't cover curling much at all.

I did notice while channel surfing this weekend that there was curling on one of the sports networks, but did not stop there and it didn't clue in for me as there is often curling on that isn't the Brier - men's, women's, mixed, the XYZ Cup, skins game, etc.

All in all the Brier seemed to be extremely low profile in terms of the national media - even in English. I flipped a lot between the half-dozen news channels I subscribe to over the weekend and neither of the CTV or CBC news channels seemed to mention the Brier in any of their sports segments.

I did not watch TSN SportsCentre last night so not sure how early in the broadcast they mentioned Gushue's Brier win. I am sure it was there somewhere (it's their "property" so they kinda have to) but on the SportsCentre homepage early this morning you had to scroll down pretty far in order to see it. Below lots of speculative stuff about the Raptors, NHL and even the Blue Jays. I highly doubt Sportsnet devoted much attention to it at all.

Isn't Kodi a "gray" market thing though? Not necessarily illegal at this time but could very well be in the future. I am not familiar with Kodi and there is no way I am going to hook up my computer to watch TV (I think that's how you do it?). Streaming sports illegaly is such a pain I stopped bothering a while ago. I subscribed to IP TV with my internet package with one of the smaller, low-cost providers. No contracts, half the price of Rogers/Bell.

The Brier is pretty prominent in Manitoba and I'm guessing most of the prairies. If you consume any kind of general local sports news (i.e. read the local papers, listen to local radio, watch local TV) there is no way you could miss it. I guess it helps that the Winnipeg Free Press often assigns one of its more prominent young reporters with a major social media presence (Melissa Martin) to the curling beat... she probably does more to expose the under 40 crowd to curling than anyone else in the province, except maybe Devin Heroux of the CBC.

It honestly feels like everyone's mom and dad watches the Brier and Tournament of Hearts even if they aren't curlers. Even my oldest kid who is obsessed with playing hockey stopped to watch curling on TV.

As far as TSN goes, when I had Sportscentre on last night, if I recall correctly they covered the Brier right after the NHL highlights. They didn't spend a ton of time on it, just showed the big highlights, a word or two from the winner (incidentally Gushue seems to have no discernible NL accent, I thought everyone there pretty well sounds like an Irishman now ;) ), flash the stats, move on. Curling coverage is fairly rare on Sportscentre, TSN does a ton of curling but it tends to be pretty standalone... Sportscentre doesn't spend that much time on it. No Craig Button equivalent breaking down the shots in the 6th end for 10 minutes, that type of thing.

As for SN, I have no idea... I don't think I've ever watched Sportscentral longer than the amount of time it took me to find the remote and change the channel.