The potential biggest star in the entire Canadian Football League is a backup.

In these parts of Southern Ontario, the name Johnny Manziel often comes up. The conversation is divided into two distinct themes: Can he play, and just how much of a draw would he be? The first is more of a Hamilton issue, where the Tiger-Cats are faced with some interesting quarterback decisions between what to do with Zach Collaros and his huge salary and potential huge upside versus Jeremiah Masoli, who is somehow keeping the Tabbies’ playoff hopes alive.

The idea of how much of a celebrity would Manziel be obviously ties into more of the Toronto market, where the team is still looking to create a bigger imprint within the city. Naturally, that leads to the idea of Manziel being a great fit into Toronto. He is a celebrity, a top NFL draft pick who played an exciting brand of football for Texas A&M that saw Manziel defeat Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide!

In my opinion, Manziel is not the player that could attract the casual sports fan to BMO Field, but there is one guy who could: Brandon Bridge.

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If you want to create a stir in any sports league, you need something that looks different. And what would make for a bigger headline than a successful Canadian quarterback leading his respective team to a potential Grey Cup?

Look at how much more attention Canadians have given towards tennis ever since Milos Raonic, Eugenie Bouchard and most recently Denis Shapovalov burst onto the scene and started challenging the top ranked players of the world. Tennis is now more a part of our national sports consciousness because we suddenly started experiencing success.

Now let’s extend this line of thought to the most important position in all of sports. It’s been almost 50 years since Russ Jackson led the Ottawa Rough Riders to a Grey Cup win. Until Bridge started for the Montreal Alouettes in the 2015 regular season finale, it had been nearly 20 years since a Canadian started a CFL game, that being Giulio Caravatta for the BC Lions in 1996. It has been a lifetime since a Canadian quarterback was relevant in the Canadian Football League. This is where Bridge steps in.

Now of course it is far too soon to take away Bridge’s performance against the Argonauts and anoint him as the next big thing in this league, but damn would it be exciting if what we saw from Bridge over the weekend was the norm.

What impressed me the most about Bridge was that he looked like he belonged. Yes, the early storyline for him when he entered the game for an ineffective Kevin Glenn was ‘here is a Toronto-born quarterback playing in his home city’. But soon the narrative switched from ‘Hey look, it’s a Canadian throwing passes!’ to just how well Bridge was performing against one of the league’s better defences.

Bridge came alive with his team down 16-3 with less than two minutes remaining in the second quarter. On the touchdown drive to cut the Argonauts’ lead to 16-10, we saw Bridge reading his second and third options, making difficult throws across the field and a clutch completion to Caleb Holley on third and three. That drive would end with a perfect-touch, over-the-shoulder pass in the corner to Naaman Roosevelt and suddenly Saskatchewan was back in the game.

One of the main complaints about Canadian quarterbacks has been they never possessed enough arm strength, a fair criticism. Well with the game tied at 24 with less than three minutes on the clock, we saw more than enough zip on the ball as Bridge found Duron Carter over the middle on a second-and-10 conversion that would soon lead to the game-winning field goal. Bridge did not turn the ball over and despite the lack of a running attack (58 yards rushing from running backs,) he completed 71 per cent of his passes for just under 300 yards. Even more impressive was how the coaching staff did not change the game plan to protect Bridge as Chris Jones called only 10 running plays compared to 28 passes.

Of course, in the end, this was only a tease as Jones has announced that Kevin Glenn will start this coming week. I’m not going to argue that decision — the team is in the middle of a playoff run and Glenn has the veteran experience. But just let your mind race at the idea that what we saw from Bridge was a sign of things to come. Soon, Bridge could become a national storyline. We could debate his chances of winning the Lou Marsh as TV stations showed old grainy footage of Russ Jackson with the caption reading “The search for the next great Canadian quarterback is over.”

Even for those Canadians who only dip their toes in the sports pond would be interested because this would be such a fresh new story — much in the same way we care about obscure sports during Olympic years or how we all attempted to pronounce “Shapovalov” this summer, the Brandon Bridge story would suddenly have a life of its own.

There is, however, one key for this to work: Bridge has to be successful on the field for this to become a real thing. Anything else and he ends up being a novelty, a “remember when” moment that fades into obscurity. So if not Bridge, than who? Well, the perfect scenario, a CFL marketer’s dream, would be to find the Andrew Wiggins of quarterbacks. A Canadian kid who is dominating on the NCAA scene for a major collegiate team so that we already have a sense of who he is before the draft. He somehow is ignored by myopic NFL scouts and soon finds himself and his redemption story playing in the 416.

If you can find that unicorn of a player and you pair him up with the city of Toronto, I believe you would have success both on and off the field. This player would be the kind of sports celebrity that every league craves, a quarterback who is winning on the field and is someone that everyone would be rooting for.

From Andrew Harris and Ted Laurent to Brad Sinopoli, there is plenty of All-Star level Canadian talent. Now it’s time for a Canadian quarterback to join that list. Here’s hoping Bridge can someday soon be that player.