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It is one of the oldest fables in Canadian football, one that’s been repeated time and time again with nearly always the same result.

A huge star in college football, usually a quarterback, fails to find an opportunity in the National Football League or his chances dry up, so he decides to try the path north of the border.

These players come from some of the biggest football schools in America, players with huge followings who’ve starred before millions of fans, both live and on television. For the most part, they never pan out in the Canadian Football League.

Can Jonathan Paul Manziel be any different? We’re about to find out.

For Manziel to become a star in Canadian football he’ll have to buck the trend that suggests the bigger the name you have when you cross the border, the less likely you are to succeed in the three-down game.

Manziel is the fifth Heisman Trophy winner to come to Canada since Doug Flutie won the award back in 1984. The others barely made a dent in the league, including former Ohio State star Troy Smith who had a stint with the Alouettes that lasted over the 2013 and 2014 seasons.

Manziel is the ninth winner of the Davey O’Brien Award, handed annually to the NCAA’s top quarterback, to come to the CFL. But aside from Flutie, who is the exception to all kinds of rules in pro football, none of them had any significant degree of success (the list includes Eric Crouch, Michael Bishop, Don McPherson, Brad Banks and Andre Ware).

In addition, quarterbacks who led their teams to NCAA championships, like Alabama’s Jay Barker, Tennessee’s Tee Martin and Florida’s Chris Leak, all came to Canada, gave it a shot and went home without leaving much of a mark.

It’s hard to say exactly why; whether these were players whose skills didn’t fit the Canadian game, that their opportunities were earned more by their names than their abilities or that they simply didn’t afford the CFL the degree of respect necessary to have success.

Or perhaps it was some combination of all of the above.

But if you were to compose a list of the CFL’s best quarterbacks of the past 35 years you’d find mostly players who were good at mid-level football schools, players who came to Canada hungry and earned everything they got. Players like Matt Dunigan, Dave Dickenson, Jeff Garcia, Anthony Calvillo, Mike Reilly, Henry Burris and Ricky Ray, to name just a few – none of whom experienced any fanfare the day they put their names on the dotted line of a CFL contract.

Manziel is hungry, confident and determined to use this opportunity to prove he can return to the National Football League. But first he’ll have to overcome history.

Manziel appears to be on long leash

After spending the first seven weeks of the season on the bench, the Montreal Alouettes appear ready to let Manziel play, and play and play.

When asked this week about how long he expected his leash to be Friday against his former team, Manziel replied, “as long as humanly possible,” adding, “I don’t even know if there is a leash.”

Head coach Mike Sherman said he expected Manziel to struggle at times, however, allowing him to “work through some of those struggles is important.”

It’s not an illogical approach, especially if the organization has tempered its expectations given the circumstances Manziel has been thrown into.

There is no other short-term answer at quarterback currently on the roster and Manziel is the Als' best chance at rejuvenating their offence at some point this season, whether than happens right away or not.

For better or worse, ideal circumstances or not, it appears the Alouettes are Manziel’s team from this point forward.

Toronto turns to Bethel-Thompson

When a team goes out and aggressively trades for the rights to a would-be free agent quarterback, talks him out of hitting the open market and then signs him to a significant contract, people are going to assume he’s there to be the short-term backup and the long-term answer to the No. 1 job.

That’s exactly how most people around the CFL viewed the Toronto Argonauts trading for the rights to James Franklin last January and then talking him out of hitting the free agent market where the suspicion is there would have been interest from Saskatchewan, Montreal and B.C. as well as Toronto.

But instead, with Ricky Ray still undecided about playing in 2018, Franklin – who was seen as the jewel of the 2018 free agent crop – opted to sign in Toronto, presumably believing the No. 2 job was his to lose.

Now, after his second poor start in a row filling in for the injured Ray, Franklin has been benched in favour of McLeod Bethel-Thompson, a 30-year-old journeymen who has been with the Argos since the beginning of last season and was the backup to Ray when the Argos defeated Calgary in the Grey Cup.

There’s always been a sense that Trestman is intrigued by Bethel-Thompson, something reflected by his refusal to declare Franklin the No. 2 quarterback during the off-season and then not until the very end of training camp.

When Franklin earned the Week 3 start after Ray was hurt, Trestman called the decision a “virtual coin flip,” which was an indication he might be on a short leash.

Shorter, it turns out, than Franklin would have liked.

Meanwhile, Bethel-Thompson, who has had 13 stops in pro football between the UFL, arena league, NFL and CFL, earns his first start north of the border at age 30.

Bethel-Thompson describes his journey as “insanity” and describes himself as an “obsessive” who has refused to let go of his football dream.

Conversely, Franklin describes himself as someone who likes football but doesn’t love it, and his happy-go-lucky demeanour has often been mistaken for not taking the game seriously enough. With the Argos at 1-5 and playing unentertaining football, Trestman believes that Bethel-Thompson has earned this opportunity.

Now a coach who has spent his time in the CFL mostly coaching Anthony Calvillo or Ray, two of the greatest of all time, is under pressure to show what he can do when his quarterback is far less accomplished and established.

Duron Carter returns to offence

Debating Saskatchewan’s Duron Carter playing defensive back last season was loads of fun when it first occurred late last season and once again early this year when Chris Jones made the switch from offence to defence.

And while fans and members of the media argued furiously over whether this was good for the Roughriders, here is where there should be no argument: it was undoubtedly bad for the CFL.

That’s because Carter is one of the most electrifying receivers in the CFL, a potential highlight machine every game whose body language is almost as entertaining as his athleticism. Removing him from the offensive side of the ball and the spotlight made the CFL less entertaining, less fun to watch.

While he made some noise on the defensive side of the ball, on their best days defensive backs draw no attention at all because they aren’t giving up big plays and opposing quarterbacks are hesitant to throw in their direction.

Let’s hope that nearly two months playing defence has him fired up to do big things catching the ball the rest of the season.

Collaros admits he hid injury

He’s surely not the only one, but when one of the CFL’s marquee players comes out and openly admits that he hid an injury suffered in a preseason game to keep playing, it’s going to cause a stir.

That’s exactly what Saskatchewan quarterback Zach Collaros did this week as he prepared to return to the starting role after spending more than a month on the six-game injured list following a concussion suffered during a Week 2 game at Ottawa.

Collaros wasn’t specific, but he did admit that the concussion suffered in Ottawa was a “carry-over of something that had happened prior and something I should have talked to the training staff about in the preseason, something that I sustained in that game and I kept it a secret.”

That’s clearly against what players are being taught these days but reminds us of the reality that the competiveness of an athlete and the potential of losing a starting job are still capable of overruling common sense.

There’s nothing anyone can do about it, which is why tracking statistics on concussions is, at best, a guess. There is no sure way of knowing how many players hide them.

But Collaros’ decision to come forth and admit he did the wrong thing should serve as a warning of the potential dangers to others.