Montreal Vanier Cup to be announced Wednesday, tapping Quebec’s passion for CIS football

Football is all about adjustments, and staging a Vanier Cup in a highly accessible major media market without giving the colossus Laval Rouge et Or an unfair home-field advantage seems like a good balancing act for Canadian Interuniversity Sport.

The worst-kept secret in CIS appears to be out. Two weeks ago, word filtered out that the CFL's Montreal Alouettes will take the lead with organizing the 50th Vanier Cup this fall, which will be played on the same weekend as the Grey Cup in Vancouver. On Tuesday, the Alouettes announced they have scheduled a press conference for Wednesday about "an important announcement about Canadian university football" with Montreal mayor Denis Coderre, Als president and chief executive officer Mark Weightman and CIS CEO Pierre Lafontaine.

Three guesses as to what that could be about. The first two don't count.

As Andrew Bucholtz elucidated recently over at 55-Yard Line, this is a win-win. It keeps the bridge going between the CFL and CIS, which are obviously interconnected. Pairing the two championship games isn't necessarily going to fly with CIS having Sportsnet and Radio-Canada as its rights-holder and CFL being joined at the hip with TSN/RDS, but here it's found a pro team that believes it can pack Molson Stadium for the event, even for two out-of-town teams.

This reflects where CIS should be heading — building bridges with all of a sports' stake-holders and movers and shakers. One shortcoming of the national organization that Lafontaine surely must be cognizant of is that CIS is not set up to do event planning. Finding partners who are equipped for reaching the audience for the tent-pole university championships is a smart step. It also eludes the trouble spot of giving the best program in the country home-field advantage for the championship game.

Between the Alouettes, three university teams with the Concordia Stingers, McGill Redmen and Montréal Carabins and down to the grassroots to the fecund CEGEP programs (frankly, six teams is not enough to accommodate the talent in the province), football is much more of a focus sport in Quebec. A Vanier in Montreal is definitely a milestone.

There is a lot to be said for hooking up with the Grey Cup, but there was a feeling that took away the essence of the CIS game, with its cozy stadiums and crowds whose emotional investment made up for the lack of massive attendance numbers. Filling the seats at 25,0-12-seat Molson seems like a reasonable goal.

The other byproduct of going to Montreal is that the city is a destination, and more reachable from Ontario. The CIS bowl rotation for this season has the Ontario champion hosting the Atlantic rep in the Mitchell Bowl, while Canada West's best visits the Quebec winner in the Uteck Bowl. Chances are, CIS could get the Ontario-Quebec Vanier that its craves, perhaps with a legacy team such as the Western Mustangs challenging Laval on its home turf in late November. In a setting that's to scale for university football, no less.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.