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If you want to win in Canadian university football these days, Mount Allison University athletic director Jack Drover says, money talks. And, more and more, it's saying something every weekend on the field.

The Mount Allison Mounties picked up their first win of the season on Saturday, 25-13 over the conference rival St. Francis Xavier X-Men, the school's sixth victory in eight years. It is a sign the Mounties may be close to turning the corner after nearly a decade of losing and turmoil.

The improvement, Drover said, is the result of an increase in the program's budget, a boost in funding from alumni and other interested parties that injected $100,000 annually – a 55-per-cent jump – into the team, beginning in 2005.

Last year, the Mounties were 2-5, their best record since 1999.

“There's certainly a correlation between the amount of money you have in a program and scoreboard success,” Drover said, pointing to a decision in 2000 that increased athletic scholarships to full tuition and fees. “Getting into the business of sport is a challenge for some of us.”

Drover, 64, has spent a lifetime at the small liberal arts university based in Sackville, N.B., and had a front-row seat when the Mounties football team rose to national prominence with Vanier Cup appearances in 1984 and 1991. The school, with an enrolment of a little more than 2,000 students, produced an unlikely interuniversity powerhouse, a team that from 1995 to 1998 boasted the top player in Canada, running back Eric Lapointe, a two-time Hec Crighton Trophy winner who went on to play in the CFL.

But as scholarships increased and what Drover calls “the corporate model” began to take hold, the Mounties fell – and fell hard.

In 2000, they won one of eight games and were outscored 330-47. In 2001, coach Robert Kitchen resigned after a season-opening 105-0 loss to the Saint Mary's Huskies. And from Sept. 14, 2002, to Oct. 9, 2006, the Mounties were winless – a span of 34 games.

Mount Allison's recent history is far from an anomaly in Canadian Interuniversity Sport, however, as a number of schools in the 27-team league have spent prolonged periods in the basement.

The University of Toronto's beleaguered football team is 2-74 in the past 10 years, outscored by an average of 46-11 in the past decade. Simon Fraser University's team hasn't won a game since 2004, and Bishop's University is 15-52 since the team's last .500 season in 1998.

“I can't speak to what other schools do – I can only speak to my own,” said CIS president Don Wilson, the athletic director at the University of Calgary. “I don't think that there's a magic formula [for winning], but first and foremost, a lot of the living and dying of the program will have to do with the coach that drives it.

“Is having enough resources an issue? Yes. Does it mean that the person with the most money will win? I don't think so.”

Drover says the increase in the Mounties' budget, which is now on par with other Atlantic University Sport programs at $280,000 a season, has made the difference between being competitive and being a laughingstock.

But can a school such as Mount Allison or Bishop's compete with the million-dollar powerhouse that is the privately funded Laval Rouge et Or, the No. 1-ranked team in the country?

“Great question,” Drover said. “I don't know. Down the road possibly, but to get there … first of all, you've got to be competitive in your own conference.”

“It would be very difficult for me to say no they couldn't,” Wilson said. “But it would certainly be very difficult for them to do it on a continual basis.”