view that the Western champion ought to be allowed to challenge for the Canadian Rugby Union's new championship trophy, the Grey Cup. To this end, the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta unions formed the Western Canada Rugby Football Union in 1911, with the Calgary Tigers winning the first Western championship later that year. The format often changed from year to year, in large part because provincial champions often declined to participate in the Western playoffs while during the latter years of World War I the competition was suspended altogether. In the years following the establishment of the BCRFU, the Western playoffs usually took the form of a four-team bracket – on these occasions, to reduce travel costs the BCRFU champion usually played the ARFU champion while the SRFU champion played the MRFU champion, with the winners of those games competing in the Western Final. Initially, Western champions were not permitted to compete for the Grey Cup, because the CRU believed the calibre of the Western clubs to be inferior to those in the East. It was not until 1921 that a Western team was finally allowed to compete in the Grey Cup game, when the Edmonton Eskimos lost 23–0 to the Toronto Argonauts. Initial challenges for the trophy met with futility – a large factor in this lack of success was the requirement that the Western champion travel to the East to compete in the championship game, but the main reason was that clubs in the larger Eastern markets were able to make the transition from amateur to professional status more quickly. Finally in 1935 a Western team, the Winnipeg Pegs (soon to be known as the present-day Blue Bombers) captured the Grey Cup, after they defeated the Hamilton Tigers (one of the forerunner teams to the modern Hamilton Tiger-Cats) 18–12. Despite Winnipeg's national title (or perhaps even indirectly because of it) football in Western Canada was in crisis by the mid-1930s. The Great Depression, which had caused serious financial difficulties for professional sports across North America, hit Western Canada particularly hard. Making matters worse was the existence of massive disparity between teams within the provincial unions. For example, by 1935 the Regina Roughriders had won fourteen consecutive SRFU titles, mostly by lopsided margins. Moreover, by the 1930s the top Western teams had begun to tap the massive U.S. talent pool, signing American players who had been passed over by the