Matt Brown, Justin Veltung situations show CFL-NFL divide isn’t always a vast talent discrepancy

The story of former Temple running back Matt Brown being unable to attend the first day of the Saskatchewan Roughriders' camp thanks to an expired passport, then immediately picking up an NFL opportunity with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is an intriguing one, but it's not as out of the blue as it may seem. Yes, there's a massive salary difference between the CFL and the NFL: this year, NFL rookies on the active roster will make a minimum of $405,000, more than all but a few CFL quarterbacks earn, while the mean CFL salary is about $83,000 (and given how that's inflated by quarterbacks, the median is likely around $60,000 or so, with rookies like Brown generally making even less). Yes, that means that the NFL can generally get any player they want (although we have seen some exceptions to that, with players like Khalif Mitchell and Travis Lulay turning down NFL opportunities in the past because they've been happy with their CFL situations). However, the entrance requirements for the two leagues aren't always that dissimilar, and as Lowell Ullrich writes, the case of Justin Veltung illustrates that.

Veltung was one of the attendees at the B.C. Lions' open tryout in Seattle earlier this month, which involved a lot of long shots trying to crack a CFL roster. Lions' director of player personnel Neil McEvoy told me the team typically brings two players from each camp they do to camp on average, meaning the other 73 or so weren't even going to make it that far. However, while some of the players at that camp clearly had no hope as professionals, plenty of them had both skill and impressive backgrounds, including former CFL player Eric Taylor, former Montana Grizzlies' RB Peter Nguyen and former Cal defensive lineman Kendrick Payne, and they wouldn't necessarily have looked out of place in an NFL camp. What happened to Veltung goes to prove that: he did well at the CFL camp (even though he didn't necessarily blow the field away), and the Lions liked him, but before they could bring him in, he signed with the NFL's Seattle Seahawks (whose minicamp he'd attended earlier in the month). As Doug Farrar points out, part of what attracted the Seahawks to Veltung was his remarkable vertical jump:

The larger point here is that while the CFL is always fishing for talent, as shown by open camps like the Seattle one, the NFL is as well—and what it takes to get into the two leagues isn't necessarily all that different, especially when you're talking about the margins of both leagues. That's not to say that the CFL's operating on a level playing field in terms of attracting talent: it's not, and the CFL's not going to land the prominent college players who go high in the NFL draft. (Well, except for maybe seven or eight years later, as we've seen with the Argonauts signing Reggie Williams and Mike Williams this offseason, guys who were NFL first-round picks in 2004 and 2005 respectively.) Plenty of CFL players have gone on to do well in the NFL, though, including Cameron Wake and Brandon Browner, and what's quite interesting is that the NFL is finding more and more spots for players like Veltung (5'10'', 183 pounds) and Brown (5'5'', 169 pounds), players with body types that once were seen as too small for that league and relegated to CFL careers. Beyond even that, though, the NFL fills up most of its rosters with veterans and touted draft picks, as does the CFL. The end of NFL and CFL rosters, the free agent long shots working to land jobs, can be surprisingly similar, though, and the players looking to catch on with either often have similar pedigrees and skills.

With the leagues evolving to more and more similar styles of play (see the proliferation of passing attacks and zone-read plays in the NFL), what it takes to crack a CFL camp and what it takes to crack an NFL camp really aren't all that different, especially when you consider that NFL camps now start with 90 players. A good college pedigree helps, but impressive performances in physical tests and positional drills matter even more, and those can help lower-profile players like Veltung and Brown get into either league. Really, what that illustrates is that there are a lot of physically gifted football players out there who are overlooked in the NFL draft. Some of them wind up in the NFL anyway, some wind up in the CFL, but the difference between who goes where isn't purely about talent: it's about players' performances on a given day, teams' needs, coaches' and executives' styles and much more. At the margins of the rosters, the CFL and the NFL aren't all that different, and plenty of players wind up with stints in both leagues over the course of their careers. It isn't simply the CFL taking the NFL's leftovers; it's a more complicated picture, and the Brown and Veltung stories show that.

While most players will likely always choose the NFL if given a choice thanks to its higher profile and its elevated salaries, making the CFL isn't necessarily any easier. Neither Veltung nor Brown would have been a lock to even make it through camp with their respective CFL teams: the Lions are absolutely loaded at receiver, so it would have been extremely tough for Veltung to crack that roster, and Saskatchewan's pretty set at running back with Kory Sheets (although Brown might have been an interesting option as a return man). They're also going to be long shots in the NFL, but they're smart to take a chance at a big payday, especially when CFL success would have been far from assured for either.

The overall point is that the CFL and NFL entrance requirements aren't that different on the margins, though, and that's why stories like Brown's and Veltung's show up. These aren't stories of the cream of the CFL crop being snapped up by the NFL after proving themselves up north; they're stories of football players who would have been a long shot on either side of the border, but have done enough to merit interest from both the NFL and the CFL. While it's somewhat unfortunate for the CFL teams involved that they didn't get to take a longer look at Brown and Veltung (although they may yet if those guys don't stick in the NFL), these stories are far from bad for the league as a whole. They say something positive about both the level of overlooked football talent out there in the wild and about the level of play in the CFL.