U Sports can learn something from NCAA’s mastery of visibility when marketing its own football product

Shekai Mills-Knight freshman running for Ole Misswill get some attention Thursday night when his Rebels take on the Miami Hurricanes in an NCAA football semifinal game in Glendale, Ariz., but he first made the news a decade ago when the elementary school student was considered too big for the local little league.

At age 9, Mills-Knight, who lived in Dollard-des-Ormeaux in the Montreal suburbs, weighed 111 pounds, making him 11 pounds is too heavy carry the ball in a league with tough weight classes. Officials refused to allow him to play running back and forced his team to forfeit four wins. For the record, his family claimed that his official weight was a typo and that young Shekai actually weighed 101 pounds.

This is an important distinction. If he drank a tall glass of orange juice at breakfast and then weighed 101, a quick pee break could bring him back to normal. But if he were a full-fledged 111, he might as well do something like Terence Crawford and find a new weight category.

His family protested the decision as best they could, but Football Quebec upheld the position restriction and the losses remained on his team's record.

Obviously, Mills-Knight made it through football anyway, having starred in five sports after finishing his prep career at Baylor High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He gained 25 yards on eight carries as a freshman at Ole Miss, but his Derrick Henrieska-esque size—6-foot-3, 220 pounds—and bulging muscles hint at his future potential.

At 19, he's young enough that we can all imagine how much better he'll be in two years, but 10 years after the youth league scandal, he's also old enough to remember when rules mattered. The league said he needed to weigh 100 pounds and robbed their team of wins to prove they meant it.

Contrast this hard-line stance with the current “anything goes” spirit governing major college football in the United States.

Player contracts?

They can be legally binding, so the University of Washington has decided that star guard Demond Williams Jr. will sign an agreement to return to the team next season. But perhaps these are just suggestions, so Williams put pen to paper and then entered the transfer portal anyway.

Loyalty?

This is conditional. That's why head coach Lane Kiffin, who left Ole Miss in November for a higher-paying job at LSU, has since been trying to poach Rebels assistant coaches even as his old team remains in the playoff picture.

What about amateurism?

Always a charming idea, but never quite feasible. With quarterbacks now demanding seven-figure sums in the transfer portal, it's officially gone from high-level US college football.

All of this upheaval has created opportunities for programs unknown to football. Until recently, if I told you that Indiana University was two wins away from a national title in a revenue-generating sport, you would have thought I was talking about men's basketball. And the idea of ​​Ole Miss surviving in the SEC and making it to the national semifinals was doomed to fail unless we were talking about baseball.

A constant amid all this change: Canadians are playing at a high level.

This year they are all in the first semi-final. Ole Miss' roster includes Mills-Knight, while Miami's roster includes Toronto-born offensive lineman Nino Francavilla and Akhim Mesidore, a 24-year-old defensive lineman from Ottawa.

This success is growing. There have been 24 Canadian-born players on NFL rosters this season, and together the trends send a strong message to stakeholders both in the United States, where college football is a major league sport, and in Canada, where the Vanier Cup is played to a dwindling audience each November.

At the elite level, Canadian soccer is healthier than ever, and even if U Sports can't stop the exodus to the U.S. or replicate the big-money business model, they can learn a lot from the NCAA about how to market and position their product on the field.

Of course, demand for college football in the U.S. among television viewers is surprisingly resilient, given how many of the elements we thought made the sport unique and compelling have disappeared in recent years. The transfer portal means your favorite players are harder to find than ever, and their team may dump other guys before you get close to them. And the belated push to pay players undermines the amateurism that NCAA officials once portrayed as the foundation upon which fan support was built.

However, we still tune in.

Soap opera styled like a sports tournament

Quarterfinal games this season averaged 19.3 million viewers in the U.S., up 14 percent from last year, according to ESPN.

What's the secret?

There's no secret.

College football is successful on television because it is a soap opera disguised as a sports tournament. Teams part ways with coaches mid-season. Coaches and former employers are haggling over an eight-figure buyout. The transfer portal gives us free agency twice a year.

It's all chaos that we claim we don't like. But it's also the drama we love. Where will the players you love and the coaches you hate end up next season? Can Alabama continue to win in the post-Nick Saban era? Will Curt Cignetti and Indiana will bet Mark Cuban's Big Recent Investments to long-term success?

We can't always answer these questions, but we'll keep an eye on them each week until we find out.

Canadian stories keep popping up, whether it's Kurtis Rourke of Oakville, Ont., defenseman for last season's Indiana Hoosiers in their first playoff game, Antwan Raymond of Lachine, Que., becoming an elite Big Ten player, or a national semifinal featuring three Canucks.

Given the stakes, it's not even worth directly comparing the Vanier Cup to the US playoffs. They are from completely different species. The College Football Playoff National Championship, scheduled for Jan. 19 in Miami Gardens, Fla., is a cultural event; The Vanier Cup is a football match.

However, just as American college football has learned the value of having an undisputed champion every year, U Sports can adapt some of the NCAA's lessons.

Not a business plan, obviously. Even schools that commit to spending big on coaches, equipment and player salaries can't afford it, which explains why the University of Utah recently accepted half a billion dollars in direct investment.

But college football in the U.S. has become more visible, and that's where U Sports and its broadcast partners, including CBC, can make progress. Every November, traditional Canadian sports fans skydive at the Vanier Cup. Sports fans on both sides of the border can follow the drama of college football year-round. This attention is the tide that lifts everyone's boat, but it depends on whether sports fans have storylines they can follow throughout and between seasons.

U Sports and its partners could work on a version of that regular broadcast presence, even if they can't replicate the ESPN Gameday experience.

The alternative is the inconsistent model we're currently stuck in, where we can't see Canadians playing college football on a weekly basis – unless they're in the US.