A fair-weather Canadian football fan's guide to the 107th Grey Cup

On any given Grey Cup weekend, millions of Canadians sit down and watch a sport some of them could not care less about during the rest of the year.

That's completely cool. You don't need to be a dedicated Canadian football fan to watch a championship game. You don't even need to be a fan at all, despite what your intense Uncle Ernie has to say.

But if you're planning on watching the 107th Grey Cup this Sunday with Ernie, or anyone else capable of recalling how the 2001 Winnipeg Blue Bombers botched a lopsided Grey Cup matchup or telling you precisely where they were when Saskatchewan's 13th man nullified a Cup-winning field-goal attempt — well, then it's not a bad idea to know a wee bit about the storied game.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Hamilton Tiger-Cats compete for the Grey Cup this Sunday at Calgary's McMahon Stadium, starting at 6 p.m. ET. Here are five other things to know about the game:

1. They're calling it the Drought Bowl

Both of the teams playing this Sunday own the longest active Grey Cup futility streaks in the Canadian Football League.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers haven't won the cup since 1990 — the year Germany was reunified, Nelson Mandela got out of prison and Iraq started the first Gulf War by invading Kuwait.

The internet, as we know it, did not yet exist. Most people did not own cellphones, which were the size of bricks.  

To say this was a lifetime ago is no overstatement. An entire generation of the Bomber fan base wasn't even alive when quarterback Tom Burgess and linebacker Greg Battle led Winnipeg to a 50-11 trashing of the Edmonton Eskimos at Vancouver's B.C. Place.

The 28-season dry spell that ensued for Winnipeg is remarkable when you consider the CFL only had eight or nine teams for the majority of those seasons. If all things remained equal — and they clearly were not — the Bombers should have stumbled into a Grey Cup victory some time between the release of Dances with Wolves and today.

The Hamilton Tiger-Cats, meanwhile, have racked up an impressive futility streak of their own. Hamilton last won the Grey Cup in 1999, when quarterback Danny McManus and the TiCats outlasted the Calgary Stampeders in a 32-21 game, also in Vancouver.

The internet was a thing by then, but the big concern that fall was the fear of computers failing when the calendar flipped over to Y2K.

Needless to say, fan bases in both Winnipeg and Hamilton have been suffering for decades and are looking for some relief this Sunday.

2. Hamilton is favoured to win

The TiCats finished the 2019 season with more wins than Winnipeg, fewer losses, a more potent offence and a stingier defence. Hamilton also beat Winnipeg both times the two teams went head to head, outscoring the Bombers 56-28 in the season series.

As a result, oddsmakers are favouring Hamilton. Nonetheless, the two teams are not that far apart statistically. 

They both score a lot on offence, don't give up much on defence, and are capable of returning kicks for touchdowns.

One variable in the mix is the two teams have not met since quarterback Zach Collaros took over the reins of the Bomber offence. Collaros has won all three of his starts at quarterback for Winnipeg: the final game of the regular season, the West Division semi-final versus Calgary and the West Division final against the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

It would be tempting to say Winnipeg has momentum coming into this game. But Hamilton has never lost momentum. The TiCats won 15 games this season, second only in league history to the 1989 Edmonton Eskimos, who were victorious in 16.

3. Collaros has one hell of a story this season

Zach Collaros started the 2019 CFL season as the No. 1 quarterback in Saskatchewan, but was injured early in his first game, when he was knocked out by Simoni Lawrence of the TiCats.

When Cody Fajardo excelled at quarterback in Collaros's place, Saskatchewan traded their erstwhile starter to the Toronto Argonauts. 

Collaros never played for the Argos, who flipped the quarterback to Winnipeg later in the season, after Chris Streveler, the Bombers' gifted rushing quarterback, was having trouble winning games in a passing role.

Collaros began crafting a fairytale ending to his season when he led the Bombers to victory over Saskatchewan. If he helps the Bombers beat Lawrence and the TiCats, his story will close with a sort of symmetry.

4. The competing coaches have history

Neither Winnipeg head coach Mike O'Shea or Hamilton head coach Orlondo Steinauer have coached in a Grey Cup before.

But they're very familiar with each other. They both played together for Toronto — O'Shea as a middle linebacker and Steinauer as a safety — and later served on the Argos' coaching staff. 

They were also traded for each other, prior to their time together in Toronto.

5. Keith Urban plays at halftime

Don't like mainstream country music? You can always spend the halftime break looking at your phone. Chances are, you were going to do that anyway.

The CFL halftime show is a curious event, where entertainers have ranged from superstars (Celine Dion, Shania Twain) to CanCon staples (Blue Rodeo, The Guess Who) to bizarre collections of disparate performers.

The best example of the latter format took place in Toronto in 2012, when Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, Marianas Trench and Gordon Lightfoot all shared a Grey Cup halftime stage.

Nobody watches football for the music, anyway. Just like nobody goes to the movies to watch the commercials before the trailers.

But it's also a Grey Cup tradition that some of the people watching the football aren't watching for the football, either.