Grey Cup

"This article contains content from Wikipedia."The Grey Cup is the name of both the championship game of the Canadian Football League (CFL) and the trophy awarded to the victorious team playing in the namesake championship of professional Canadian football. It 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. The Toronto Argonauts have the most Grey Cup wins (17) since its introduction in 1909, while the Edmonton Eskimos have the most Grey Cup wins (11) since the creation of the CFL in 1958. The latest, the 107th Grey Cup, took place in Calgary, Alberta, on November 24, 2019, when the Winnipeg Blue Bombers defeated the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 33–12.

The Grey Cup game 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, Most Valuable Player and the Dick Suderman Trophy as most valuable Canadian player. As a member of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Andrew Harris is the only player to win both the Dick Suderman Trophy and the Grey Cup Most Valuable Player the same year, which he did in 2019. 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 later donated for that purpose, Grey instead made his trophy available as the "Canadian Dominion Football Championship" (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 University of Toronto Varsity Blues. 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 (except for 1970) has always been on a Sunday. Held in late November (in some years, but not since 1972, the game was played in early December), 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 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.