The campus is still buzzing about one of the great football games in Ontario University Athletics (OUA) history, Saturday’s Yates Cup victory by the hometown Golden Gaels over the visiting University of Western Ontario Mustangs. As chaplain of our Queen’s football team, I had a privileged place on the sidelines to watch not only the OUA championship victory, but also the conclusion to a great quarterback rivalry stretching back five years.
Conclusion? Sadly, yes. Michael Faulds, the great Mustangs pivot, was the losing quarterback on Saturday and, as a fifth-year senior, will never throw another pass in competitive football. The victor, the Golden Gaels’ Danny Brannagan, also a fifth-year senior, has the national semi-final this Saturday and, if victorious over Laval, then the Vanier Cup national championship. After that, he’s done too.
They’re done because there is no room in the CFL for Canadian quarterbacks. League rules requires that out of 39 players dressed for a game, at least 20 must be non-imports — “non-imports” is what the CFL calls Canadians, which reveals rather a lot. In addition to the 39 players, teams are permitted to dress three designated quarterbacks, and those three can be either Canadians or imports. So there is no Canadian quota for quarterbacks; in fact, CFL quarterbacks are Americans. No matter how exciting up-and-coming quarterbacks are in Canadian university football, they are not up-and-comers. There is no place for them to up and come to.
Consider what has been drawn to a premature end for Brannagan, 23, and Faulds, 26. For the past five years they have faced each other as part of an already intense Queen’s-Western rivalry.
Faulds is the most prolific passer in Canadian university history, setting the record this year for most career passing yards. Led by Faulds, Western has been the dominant team in the OUA, appearing four out of five times in the Yates Cup championship, winning it twice.
Brannagan finished second in the career passing yards category, finishing with less than 1% fewer yards (10,714 to Fauld’s 10,811). So evenly matched were the two that in the seven games they went head-to-head, they were only separated by five yards of passing (Faulds was ahead, 2,081 to 2,076).
In the Brannagan-Faulds era, Queen’s has been dominant head-to-head, going 5-2 since 2005. Brannagan defeated Faulds in a series of spectacular games, including two showdowns for first place, an overtime thriller, and last Saturday’s championship.
Yet the rivalry, instead of creating anticipation for what might happen at the next level, is now over before the nation as a whole could participate in it. With American colleges churning out top quality quarterbacks by the dozen each year, neither Brannagan nor Faulds will merit a legitimate chance to play in the CFL.
Which is a shame, because having a Canadian game without Canadian — “non-import” — quarterbacks means that Canadian (“non-import”?) fans cannot follow the marquee players from elite university football into the pro ranks.
The solution is easy enough — to redraw the quotas so that Canadians must be included among the three designated quarterbacks. I would even be in favour of raising the Canadian quotas in general, going even so far to mandate Canadian quarterbacks. Alas, the rumours about the next round of bargaining between CFL players and owners suggest that the trend is in the opposite direction–fewer Canadians required, not more.
We already have a league for the world’s best football players. It’s called the NFL. CFL fans know that — having watched Warren Moon dominate the CFL as a young player before heading to the NFL, and Doug Flutie, breaking records here after not making it in the NFL. The CFL is not about the best players, but about the good of the Canadian game. Imagine watching the CFL playoffs this weekend and seeing Canadian quarterbacks in the spotlight. Or imagine watching Queen’s and Laval this Saturday, and thinking that the men on the field may well be directing a CFL offence one day.
While the overall quality of play may drop, the games themselves could be just as exciting. Anyone who doubts that has not been watching Danny Brannagan and Michael Faulds these past years. The sadness is that those who haven’t been watching will never get a chance to see them. As a Queen’s man, I want to see Danny continue to play; as a football fan, I want to see the Mustangs’ man, too.