There's a buzz about Sunday's Grey Cup game, and it's not just because the Canadian Football League's marquee teams -- the Montreal Alouettes and Edmonton Eskimos -- are meeting for the championship.

There is plenty of talk this week about the astonishing television audiences the CFL has been attracting.

At a time when increased channel selection is fragmenting viewership and cutting into ratings, the CFL is a success story. That's particularly true in the Toronto market, where the Argonauts have been outdrawing the National Football League telecasts during the past two weeks.

The CBC has averaged 1.181 million viewers a game during the CFL's postseason, a jump of 48 per cent over last year. That number is comparable to the prime-time Saturday audiences for Hockey Night in Canada.

"When you get audiences early on a Sunday afternoon that are the equal of prime-time hockey audiences, it's a significant message," said Brian Williams, the CBC's Grey Cup host. "And the message is, people in Southern Ontario are watching."

TSN's CFL ratings increased 26 per cent from last year. Keith Pelley, the president of TSN, said Canadian football is a hit everywhere. But he added that some fans are ashamed to admit they tune in, because it's perceived to be uncool.

"It's a phenomena similar to World Wrestling Entertainment," Pelley said. "Nobody admits to watching it, but it's [the WWE's Monday night Raw program] consistently the highest rated show."

Adam Ivers, the vice-president of programming for CanWest Global, said the league's timing couldn't be better. When the Grey Cup game concludes Sunday night, network rights will have expired and bids will be accepted for a deal.

"There's no question the CFL has picked a good time to put on some exciting football matches," he said.

Ivers declined to comment on Global's interest in the CFL, but sources say Global and the CBC are sure to bid. The conventional broadcaster that wins the rights will be expected by the league to televise a Saturday night prime-time game during the summer of 2003. The CBC has already planned a pregame show to go with a Saturday night telecast.

But TSN, as the current rights holder, has a right of first refusal on any offer. Pelley said TSN will aggressively pursue the CFL's cable rights. Its conventional broadcast partner could be either Global or the CBC.

The sudden interest in CFL television makes it seem like an overnight success. But the growth actually started five years ago when TSN paid a record amount ($35-million over five years) for the entire CFL television package.

At the time, both the league and TSN were in a tough spot. The CFL's expansion to the United States had been a failure. TSN, suddenly confronted by competition, had just lost the cable rights to National Hockey League games to the upstart CTV Sportsnet. To save face, it desperately needed CFL rights, and it overpaid to get them.

"We'd made a huge investment," Pelley said. "So the first thing we did was map out a marketing plan. That involved establishing some consistency. When you asked people when NFL games were played, they said Sunday. When you asked about the CFL, you heard Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, any day of the week.

"So we created Friday Night Football. We also changed our philosophy. We wanted to focus far more on the stars in the game and the stories on the field, rather than the stories in the boardroom.

"And finally, we increased our promotion in the first year by 60 per cent. We wanted people to know about the league and to get interested."

In 1997, TSN's average audience was 155,000 viewers a game. This year, the audience was 336,000, an increase of 117 per cent over five years. The CBC's audience is 450,000 a game, an increase of 43 per cent from 1997, and 19 per cent from last year.

Still, it would be a mistake to assume the CFL has the NFL on the run. The CBC's two Argo playoff telecasts outdrew Global's NFL game in Southern Ontario, but Ivers said it's not fair to compare a CFL playoff game with an NFL midseason game.

At TSN, national telecasts of CFL and NFL games pull in identical audiences, about 335,000 viewers. When the Toronto-Calgary game of Nov. 3, which Toronto needed to win or tie to advance to the playoffs, went head-to-head against the Buffalo-New England NFL game on Global, the NFL game won in the Toronto market. Global's telecast drew 372,000 viewers compared with TSN's 275,000 for the Argos. However, Global, as an over-the-air network, has a larger reach than TSN.

Mike Brannagan, the executive producer of CBC Sports, said he believes the CFL's playoff TV success has been driven by the Argos' late-season drive, starting Oct. 20 when the club honoured Muhammad Ali. TSN drew 488,000 viewers for that game, its second largest CFL audience of the season, then bettered that on Nov. 3, drawing 508,000 for the Toronto-Calgary game.

All of this would seem to point to a huge audience for the Grey Cup. For the past four years, the Grey Cup has been drawing about three million viewers on the CBC, but an important factor is the calibre of the game. If it turns into a blowout, viewers will tune out. Montreal's appearance in the championship game means the CBC will lose about 400,000 to 500,000 viewers to RDS's French-language broadcast.

By the numbers

The top five audiences for a Grey Cup game on CBC:
1983: Toronto 18, B.C. 17; 4.2 million
1987: Edmonton 38, Toronto 36; 3.9 million
1994: B.C. 26, Baltimore 23; 3.9 million*
1982: Edmonton 32, Toronto 16; 3.8 million
1991: Toronto 36, Calgary 21; 3.5 million*

*In the fall of 1989, A. C. Nielsen changed from diary measurements to people metres and from quarter-hour audiences. Those audiences marked with an asterisk are average-minute audiences.