U Sports football has never been better. So why has the Vanier Cup struggled to find an audience?

The ad appears halfway through the sports section of theToronto Star on Nov. 16, 1993, splashy white letters against a backdrop of black ink in the bottom-left quadrant of the broadsheet newspaper page. 

If Joe Carter’s walk-off home run to clinch the World Series three weeks earlier provided the climax to Toronto’s year in sports, then the Vanier Cup, scheduled for Nov. 20 that year, and featuring a showdown between the University of Calgary Dinos and the resurgent University of Toronto, with a national title at stake, shaped up as a thrilling encore.

And if the prospect of watching the Varsity Blues, a program that, 12 months earlier, had been targeted for cancellation as a U of T cost-cutting measure, complete an improbable run to the national title didn’t motivate you to call Ticketmaster, maybe some of the game-day bonuses, all detailed in the advertisement, would do it.

Maybe it was the halftime show.

Or the post-game reception.

Or the raffle for a brand-new 1994 Geo Tracker, the kind of pocket-sized SUV that gained popularity in the mid-1990s.

If none of those perks could lure you to the then-named SkyDome, perhaps ticket costs would make the difference. Where World Series seats in the Dome’s 100-level retailed for $67, the Vanier Cup sold tickets at three price points: $10.50, $15.50 and $25.50. 

Those figures seem comically low until you run them through an inflation calculator. In 2025 dollars, the cheapest seat would cost $20.21, the mid-priced one would sell for $29.83, and premium seats would cost $49.07.

And those numbers make prices for this year’s Vanier Cup, scheduled for this Saturday at Mosaic Stadium in Regina, Sask. (CBC, Gem, CBCSports.ca, 3 p.m. EST), and pitting the Saskatchewan Huskies against