Although most football fans were watching the Chiefs and Broncos, there was another great game that went into overtime on Sunday night: The Grey Cup, the championship game of the Canadian Football League. Unfortunately for American viewers, a crucial part of the game was missed.
ESPN2 aired the Grey Cup, which saw Ottawa lead Calgary 33-23 before Calgary staged a furious comeback in the final minutes of the fourth quarter. Calgary scored a touchdown to narrow the margin to 33-30, then executed a beautiful onside kick and recovered to get the ball back. With Calgary driving down the field again, the screen suddenly went blank for ESPN2 viewers at 10 p.m. Eastern, then went to commercials. Eventually a crawl at the bottom of the screen informed viewers that ESPN was having technical difficulties.
An ESPN source tells PFT that the lost feed was a result of a vendor issue which caused an outage between the Canadian network that produced the game and ESPN2, which aired the Canadian production. It did not affect Canadian viewers.
Fortunately fans missed only a few minutes before the game came back on, and Calgary’s game-tying score and Ottawa’s win in overtime were both shown on ESPN2. But during the brief outage, American fans of the CFL were active on social media wondering what was going on. If you can imagine the reaction to fans losing the game broadcast during the final minutes of a close Super Bowl, that was the reaction among the admittedly relatively small number of fans watching the Grey Cup.
