Vanier Cup appears headed to Montreal in 2014, and perhaps to its own weekend at some point

Big CIS football news broke Wednesday, thanks to a report that the 2014 Vanier Cup will be held in Montreal. (Thanks to Yahoo's Neate Sager for that find.) The above piece, from Charles Payette of Montreal's 98.5 FM news station, indicates that this fall's Vanier Cup, which will be the historic 50th edition of the game (it started in 1965 as an invitational championship game before going to a playoff format in 1967) is going to be held at Percival Molson Memorial Stadium, the home of both the CFL's Montreal Alouettes and CIS' McGill Redmen. That could be an excellent decision, and one that could make for a memorable Vanier.

Heading to Montreal is a bit of a change for the Vanier Cup. Three of the last five championships (including last year's) have been held at Laval's stadium in Quebec City, with the other two in Vancouver and Toronto as part of the short-lived Vanier Cup-Grey Cup pairing. While the dominant defending champion Rouge et Or (who have won three of the last five championships and appeared in four of them) will still likely be favoured to make it to the Vanier, they won't have quite as much of a home-field advantage this time around. Perhaps even more importantly, Montreal's more of a destination, one closer to a lot of CIS schools, and it's one that should inspire plenty of students from the competing schools (and perhaps even from neutral ones) to make a road trip for the Vanier. That could lead to a great atmosphere.

What's interesting is that this event won't be put on by a CIS school. According to Payette, it will be the Alouettes organizing the 2014 Vanier, not the Redmen or other Montreal CIS teams like the Université de Montréal's Carabins. That's a bit of an unusual move, but one that should work out decently; the Alouettes' organization has plenty of experience hosting big events (including the 2008 Grey Cup), they know the stadium and the city well, and they should be able to throw an impressive Vanier Cup. That move also suggests that closer CFL-CIS ties may be on the horizon.

Of course, those ties aren't as close as they have been in the past. This fall's Grey Cup will be in Vancouver, where the Grey Cup and Vanier Cup were first paired in 2011 to stunning success, and that partnership worked out well in Toronto the following year, but the events split off last year. That could have been just a trial separation thanks to hotel and space issues in Regina, but even last spring it was looking like a long-term divorce, and the six-year deal CIS signed with Sportsnet last May made it seem highly unlikely the two events were getting back together (given the difficulties in having different networks broadcast events from the same location, plus the Sportsnet/TSN rivalry) any time in the near future. Thus, it's not surprising that CIS isn't putting this game in Vancouver; that partnership appears to be dead.

There were some rumblings earlier this week that the two events might be paired again in 2015 after the news that Winnipeg would get that year's Grey Cup broke, with University of Manitoba athletics director Coleen Dufresne telling Global last summer that she'd love to explore the possibility of hosting a joint Vanier Cup-Grey Cup. As Jim Mullin explored earlier this year, the city would be a great fit for a paired championship on a lot of levels. However, the CFL's official announcement of the 2015 Grey Cup Wednesday went against that; Winnipeg radio station CJOB reported that the possibility of pairing the two was deemed unlikely:

There is one interesting potential advancement on the CFL-CIS relationship front, though. Winnipeg Sun multimedia editor Rich Pope was at the Grey Cup announcement Wednesday, and he tweeted that the possibility of working to give CIS their own championship weekend (i.e., having the Grey Cup and the Vanier Cup played on different weekends instead of the traditional overlap) was brought up. That wouldn't start right away, as the 2014 game is expected to be on the same weekend as the Grey Cup (which could be fun for the Alouettes' organization if they're in the CFL championship game in Vancouver that weekend), but it would make a lot of sense as an eventual development, especially as the pairing of the two events seems unlikely to return any time soon. Having the events both on the same weekend in different cities tends to mean that the Vanier gets overshadowed in the leadup to the Grey Cup. Playing it on a different weekend would let CIS have its own spotlight, and it would probably mean that more football media and fans would attend too.

Of course, this may not be easy to set up, as both the CFL and CIS will likely be reluctant to move their marquee event and rearrange their season schedules, but it's a possibility well worth exploring. Both levels of Canadian football are highly interconnected, and it would be great to see them work together in a constructive way to show off both of their championship games. Having the Alouettes involved in running this fall's Vanier Cup seems like a positive development on the CIS-CFL relationship front, and the discussion of separating the championship weekends could be another one. We'll see how closely the organizations are able to work together going forward, but there's some room for optimism here. In any case, the historic 50th Vanier Cup in Montreal this fall should be a great one.