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McMaster University Marauders' Kyle Quinlan prepares to throw the ball during the second half of play against the Laval University Rouge et Or's at the Vanier Cup Canadian university football championship in Vancouver, B.C., on Friday November 25, 2011. The Montreal Alouettes are giving Canadian quarterback Kyle Quinlan a shot to crack their roster.The CFL club announced Tuesday it had signed McMaster quarterback to a two-year contract.Jonathan Hayward/CP

In the good old days, when the world was filmed in black and white, Canadian-born signal-callers roamed the CFL in bunches.

No longer.

In 1996, Giulio Caravatta of Toronto started a regular-season game for the B.C. Lions –no homegrown quarterback has been able to make that boast since.

The league has taken steps in recent years toward changing that, and has expanded an initiative to bring Canadian university quarterbacks in for a taste of what it takes to be a pro.

No team is giving it more attention than the Montreal Alouettes, who have invited seven: one each from the six university programs in Quebec, and one from Ottawa.

Montreal also signed two Canadian university quarterbacks to free-agent deals this spring – Kyle Quinlan (McMaster Marauders) and Kyle Graves (Acadia Axemen) – and both will be with the team for the duration of training camp (non-import quarterbacks don't count against the roster ratio).

"I think the talent's there, I think we as a league can continue to find ways to give them a better chance," Als general manager Jim Popp said.

The search for the next Russ Jackson or Gerry Dattilio continues apace, but for every Brad Sinopoli – a University of Ottawa alumnus who is currently on the Calgary Stampeders depth chart – there is a Marc-Olivier Brouillette, a quarterback at the University of Montreal who has had to reinvent himself as a linebacker for the Als.

The main point of differentiation between Canadian and U.S. college quarterbacks is quality of competition and complexity of offensive schemes, Popp said, adding the rise of university programs such as the Laval Rouge et Or and the greater prevalence of year-round training complexes have helped close the gap.

The undergraduate invitees will only spend two official training camp days with the CFL team, but Popp said it's a useful introduction.

"We're tutoring, we're going to put them through the entire experience … medical conditioning test, the Wonderlic [cognitive abilities]test, clinics with [offensive co-ordinator Marcus]Brady, they'll go into team meetings, position meetings, they will sit in a room with our future Hall of Famer in Anthony Calvillo and understand what it takes to be at that level," Popp said.

It's a free look at the emerging local quarterback talent, and even if few or any will ever play a down in the pro ranks, they're happy to entertain the dream.

"I don't think it's just a [public relations]exercise, we're here to see the football-operations side, we're alongside the draft picks, the American free agents, the rookies, they want to give us a taste of what it's like to be an Alouette," said 20-year-old Jérémi Doyon-Roch of the University of Sherbrooke, who was third in the nation in passing last season, his first in CIS.

The 6-foot-3, 23-year-old Quinlan, who has another year of CIS eligibility, said he benefited from a similar experience last season with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

"I stayed in residence with the guys, had all the meals, all the film sessions, I was completely immersed in the training camp process. The biggest thing was the film, learning the reads and processing that alongside them," he said. "There's things that I took straight from the Hamilton coaching staff and applied it right away to McMaster."

Quinlan made his name in a thrilling overtime defeat of Laval in the 2011 Vanier Cup, and hopes to emulate Jackson, his school's most-famous football grad.

The odds are not in his favour.

The last Canadian to throw a pass in the CFL is Danny Brannagan, who came in for mop-up duty in the Toronto Argonauts' 2010 season finale against Montreal. (He was cut the next spring.)

You have to go back to 1996, to find a season where more than one Canadian quarterback took a snap (Caravatta and Larry Jusdanis with Hamilton).

Whether any of the Als contingent of Canadians will draw tangible benefits from being in head coach Marc Trestman's orbit is also an open question.

With training camp running just under three weeks, there won't be much in the way of practice reps, and Trestman, a quarterback guru of considerable repute, has no explanation for why so few Canadians have been deemed good enough in the past.

"I can't answer that. I haven't been around it, I don't have any experience with college players in Canada," he said. "But it's going to be great to have them around, to get to know them, and to watch them work."

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