- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
It's misleading to proclaim the NFL's players vastly superior to the those in the CFL. For one thing, the different rules attract and produce different kinds of athletes. The plodding quarterbacking of someone like Drew Bledsoe would not survive in the CFL, which typically demands more mobile quarterbacks to handle the larger field and the loss of a down. In this sense, the CFL was ahead of its time, breeding scrambling QBs long before the NFL embraced this model (consider Argo great Condredge Holloway - http://www.argonauts.ca/Argos/History/HallOfFame/Condredge_Holloway.html, or Eskimo great Warren Moon).
Flutie, for example, was a legend in the CFL because he was built for that league, and because the NFL snubbed him after he chose to play in the USFL. Other, taller pivots, such as Jeff Garcia, have emerged from the CFL and become top quarterbacks in the NFL (a few years ago, Garcia was one of the best rated QBs in the NFL).
One thing the NFL does well to ensure people believe its athletes are the best in the world, and not simply the best suited for the NFL's rules, is promote the players as unparalleled. You almost never hear an announcer of an NFL broadcast say something critical about a player. Every player is described as the "best" at something, or the "most underrated" at something else. It's smart marketing, and it seems to work.
