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Keep in mind, here, that the XFL made a point of announcing on Thursday: We got Landry Jones! First player in league history! (Double finger-guns.)

The CFL, of course, is the furthest thing from fledgling. Second-oldest championship trophy in North American pro sports, and all that

Perhaps all they were hoping for was the same reaction across the football world that I had: hey, I have heard of him. It’s a weird way to build excitement in your fledgling league.

The CFL, of course, is the furthest thing from fledgling. Second-oldest championship trophy in North American pro sports, and all that. As recently as last fall, the prospect of two planned spring football leagues in the United States loomed as some degree of a competitive threat. The would-be Alliance of American Football and the reconstituted XFL each had wealthy, connected people involved and they were promising base salaries considerably higher than those of the CFL, and a schedule that fit better with players who still harboured thoughts of an NFL career. Play for one of the new leagues in the spring, perform well, and go straight into an NFL camp. The CFL has seen off many such threats over the decades, but if one ever does stick, it would represent something of a crisis for the Canadian league’s talent base. Certain wiseacre columnists — whistles idly, shuffles feet — wondered at the Grey Cup last year if either the AAF or the XFL would be the one to do it.

Photo by Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

But the AAF came and went before it even completed a season, with Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon bizarrely arriving to be its saviour and then its executioner in a matter of weeks. Now it is the XFL’s turn. The league went through a series of head-coach announcements already, with most of the names recognizable to football fans: Bob Stoops, June Jones, Marc Trestman and, er, Jim Zorn. But finding coaches was always going to be the easy part, as there are far more of them than there are high-profile professional coaching jobs. Finding players is the greater challenge, and announcing Landry Jones as the marquee first signing only underscores that point. The XFL says it plans to sign seven more “leading” quarterbacks before a draft in October — confusingly, players sign with the league first, and then enter a draft to find out where they will play — and it expects that a good chunk of its talent pool will be filled by those players who are among the final cuts at NFL camps over the next few weeks. But many such players would rather try to hang on and land on a different NFL team, or even its practice squad, before signing up with Vince McMahon’s latest pet project. Jones is the only example because he’s the only guy signed, but he’s not an up-and-comer trying to use the XFL as a springboard to the NFL, he’s someone who likely realized that his NFL days are over and so he will make some money this way. Feel the excitement!