Banjo Bowl: How a Kicker's Insult Built the CFL's Best Rivalry

The Insult That Started It All

The Banjo Bowl did not begin as a marketing plan. It began as a mistake — a throwaway line from a placekicker who could not have known he was naming one of Canadian sport's most durable rivalries.

In 2003, Winnipeg Blue Bombers kicker Troy Westwood — still the franchise's all-time leading scorer — went on a Winnipeg radio station ahead of the annual Labour Day Classic and described the people of Saskatchewan as "a bunch of banjo-picking inbreds." The Labour Day Classic was already a prairie institution by then, dating to 1949, when the Roughriders began hosting the Bombers in Regina on the first Monday of September. But Westwood's line gave the home-and-home a name it could never shake.

Saskatchewan won the Labour Day Classic that year in Regina. A week later, the rematch at Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg turned into something else entirely: fans showed up carrying banjos, the Bombers rolled to a 44-15 win, and a careless insult had become a brand.

"A bunch of banjo-picking inbreds." — Troy Westwood, 2003

Westwood apologized, and over the years he did charity work in Saskatchewan to make amends. But the damage — or the gift, depending on which side of the Saskatchewan River you sit — was done.

From Gimmick to Institution

In 2004, the Bombers made it official: the return leg of the Labour Day home-and-home would be called the Banjo Bowl. What could have been a one-year stunt became the CFL's most reliably sold-out regular-season game outside of a Grey Cup. The club has since published an Oral History of the Banjo Bowl, and the game has its own mythology — the banjos in the stands, the Saskatchewan fans who travel in, the sense that a September game in Winnipeg carries August-in-November weight.

The game followed the franchise through three stadiums: Canad Inns Stadium, Investors Group Field (opened 2013, renamed IG Field in 2019 and Princess Auto Stadium in 2023). It survived the cancelled 2020 season and returned in 2021 to a packed house. It has outlasted coaching regimes, quarterback carousels, and every round of league existentialism.

Saturday's 19-6 Winnipeg win was the latest chapter. The Bombers' defence kept Saskatchewan out of the end zone, Canadian receiver Tommy Nield celebrated his first touchdown of the season against the Roughriders, and the result landed in the middle of a West Division race that is, by every measure, still wide open — a fact the league's own season-series breakdown makes clear.

That is the Banjo Bowl's real function. It is not a novelty. It is a measuring stick. In a league where the regular season sometimes struggles for stakes, the Labour Day Classic and the Banjo Bowl deliver two guaranteed, emotionally loaded, near-sellout games every single year.

A Rivalry That Outlasted the Drought

Here is the thing about the Banjo Bowl: it kept happening while the Bombers were not winning Grey Cups.

Winnipeg's 1990 Grey Cup — a 50-11 demolition of Edmonton, still among the most lopsided championship games in CFL history — was followed by 29 years without a title. Generations of Bomber fans grew up knowing the Labour Day home-and-home intimately and knowing a championship only as something their parents described. The drought ended on November 24, 2019, in Calgary, when the Bombers beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 33-12. Two years later, in a COVID-delayed December Grey Cup in Hamilton, they beat the Tiger-Cats again, 33-25.

Since then, Winnipeg has appeared in four consecutive Grey Cups (2021 through 2024), winning in 2021 and falling in 2022 to Toronto (24-23), in 2023 to Montreal (28-24), and in 2024 to Toronto (41-24). That is a dynasty's résumé with a frustrating final chapter — and it is the context in which Saturday's 19-6 win over Saskatchewan should be read.

And before the drought, before the Banjo Bowl, before any of it, there was Bud Grant. Grant coached the Bombers from 1957 to 1966 and won four Grey Cups — 1958, 1959, 1961 and 1962 — building the standard against which every Winnipeg team since has been measured. The 1962 championship, the "Fog Bowl," was suspended by fog in Toronto and completed the next day, Winnipeg beating Hamilton 28-27. Grant left for the Minnesota Vikings and a Pro Football Hall of Fame career. The Bombers spent the next half-century chasing what he built.

The through-line is not complicated. The Bombers' greatest eras — Grant's four titles, the 1990 blowout, the 2019 breakthrough, the four-year run that followed — were all built on the same foundation: a small market that cares disproportionately, a rival next door that cares just as much, and a pair of September games that sell out no matter what the standings say.

What Fans Should Take From This

Rivalries in the CFL are not manufactured by league offices. They are accidents of geography and temperament — Regina and Winnipeg, two prairie cities that have spent seventy-five years arguing about which one matters more. The Banjo Bowl is what happens when that argument gets a name.

The 2025 edition, a 19-6 defensive grind, was not a classic by any aesthetic measure. It did not need to be. It drew the crowd, it moved the West Division standings, and it added another entry to a file that now runs more than two decades deep. Tommy Nield will remember his first touchdown of the season because of who it came against. That is the whole point.

For fans watching the current Bombers grind through a tight Western race, the lesson from 2003, from 1990, from 1962 is the same one Bud Grant's teams taught: the games that matter most are the ones against the people you have to live beside. Win those, and the rest tends to follow. Lose them, and you spend a very long time waiting for November.