The Canadian QB

This week's bit of CIS business in The Globe is a look at the four quarterbacks left standing heading into Saturday's Bowl games:

John Makie from Manitoba
Mike Faulds from Western
Cesar Sanchez-Hernandez from Laval
and Erik Glavic from Saint Mary's

I was also able to track down the Bisons coach, Brian Dobie, for a chat, and he sounded genuinely thrilled/surprised at how the Hardy Cup game ended up going (a 48-5 romp over Regina). Both Manitoba and Western said they were just starting to get a look at one another via game tape, so I'm afraid I don't have much in the way of game plans for either side.

Sunday was actually Faulds's 24th birthday, so it was especially nice that he took some time out of his day to chat a bit. The media requests on these guys are starting to pileup, something that will reach an apex heading into the Vanier Cup here in Toronto.

"We knew going in that Guelph was going to be a tough team," Faulds said of the Yates Cup game. "We probably played as poorly as we did all year when we played them before in Game 4, so we knew we were going to have to change a lot of things."

I'll probably have more from Faulds later in the week.

Glavic sounds like an interesting cat. He's the youngest of the four pivots left at 21, but seems to have a pretty laissez-faire take on this whole Bowl game business.

Maybe that's why they call him 'Easy E', or the 'Snowman', which he gave as his two nicknames on the team.

On what happened against St. FX in the Jewett Trophy game: "We persevered and came out with a win, so we’ll live."

We talked about the spread as well, where the X-Men were said to be 27-point underdogs. "I asked the guys, who would you take, would you bet on us? Would you take the 27 points ... the bad weather, even to put up 27 points is tough."

He said he got knocked around a bit in that one, and that his throwing game was off given his shoulder was stiff/sore. Still, this was a big deal.

"To win a championship – everybody wants to talk about the Vanier Cup, Vanier Cup, but you’ve got to be an AUS champ before you can win that. That’s definitely a huge win for us and definitely the biggest of my career. No time to celebrate on that."

He said he thinks he compares to Vince Young, as for someone in the pros, and talked about about his family. His parents were immigrants (mother from Peru, father from Croatia) and didn't know much about football when he and his two brothers picked it up, but all three were terrific high schoolers at St. Mary Secondary in Pickering.

I didn't get a chance to catch up with the other fellows, at least not yet, but stay tuned. I don't think a Laval-Manitoba Vanier Cup is all that farfetched, and there may be quite a bit written about both teams by the time we're done.