TOO PROUD TO STAY
Burris unwilling to be anyone’s backup
Henry Burris is taking the idea of going out on top to another level.
Never before has a 41-year-old quarterback won a Grey Cup. Few players of any age have delivered a comparable performance in a championship game to the one he gave — against one of the best single-season teams in CFL history — on Nov. 27 at BMO Field in Toronto.
Yet Burris will walk away from it all when he announces his retirement Tuesday, with Redblacks teammates, coaches and staff in attendance at a news conference, and it will feel like he’s doing it too soon.
If old Hank doesn’t have a tear in his eye, it will be a surprise. Burris isn’t hanging them up because he wants to. He isn’t saying goodbye to the game he loves because he feels it’s time, or that he can’t do it anymore. He just has no other choice.
What led him to his status as the No. 3 passer in CFL history is his fierce competitiveness, and that trait will simply not allow him to stand on the sidelines as the backup to Trevor Harris next season, unable to have a direct hand in the outcome of a game. It has never permitted him to be content playing behind anybody.
You really can’t blame the Redblacks for this predicament, either. To seal the deal for Harris’ signing in Ottawa last winter, they had to give him starter’s money for 2017. They also had to get Burris to agree to a pay cut if he was coming back just to make it work under the salary cap.
How did they know Burris would still be at the top of his game? And even if they had a hunch, how could they pass up a chance for a QB tandem of the league’s most outstanding player in 2015 and the CFL leader in touchdown passes that year?
The Redblacks had no interest in a long, slow growth. After making it to the Grey Cup game in 2015, they wanted a championship team, and pronto. They did what was necessary, and now they have to pay one of the consequences.
Burris, meanwhile, leaves a league he joined in 1997 when, after a record-setting four years at Temple University in Philadelphia, he was undrafted by the NFL. He paid his dues for one season on Calgary’s practice roster, finally getting some playing time in 1998 as a third stringer behind Jeff Garcia and Dave Dickenson as the Stampeders went on to win the Grey Cup.
Not satisfied to wait his turn in Calgary, Burris signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, where he started 16 games while throwing for 4,647 yards and 30 touchdowns. When the Green Bay Packers expressed interest in him the following season, that drive to be the best led him to a better league. But in Green Bay, he never made it above third-string status before he was released later that season. He signed with the Chicago Bears the following year and played six games for them, but after being assigned to NFL Europe for a stint with the Berlin Thunder — and being none too happy about it — he returned to the CFL.
Burris spent the 2004 campaign with Saskatchewan, leading the Roughriders to the Western final, then signed with Calgary, where he spent the next seven seasons, winning a Grey Cup (2008) and a most outstanding player award (2010) before the Stamps decided to go with the younger Drew Tate.
At that point Burris welcomed a trade to Hamilton, where he could again take over a starter’s role. He posted big numbers in his first season as a Ticat, and brought the team to the Grey Cup in his second.
But that wasn’t good enough for Hamilton general manager and head coach Kent Austin, who signed free agent Zach Collaros. Feeling disrespected for one of the hundreds of times in his life, Burris signed with the expansion Redblacks.
In just three years, the product
If old Hank doesn’t have a tear in his eye, it will be a surprise. … He just has no other choice.
of Spiro, Okla., will be quick to remind you, he has guided Ottawa from the outhouse to the penthouse, giving the nation’s capital its first Grey Cup in four decades.
In three years as a Redblack, he brought his career passing totals to 63,227 yards and 374 touchdowns, third behind only Anthony Calvillo and Damon Allen in both categories. In three years, he has increased his collection of hardware to three Grey Cup rings and two most outstanding player awards — and he was the most valuable player in the last game he ever played.
Burris will be 42 by the time next season starts, yet it feels like he’s leaving the game too soon. He’d need three, probably four, more good seasons to catch Calvillo for the all-time lead in passing yards and touchdowns, and right now it doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that he could do it.
Instead, Burris will retire as merely one of the greatest quarterbacks in CFL history, which isn’t a bad legacy to leave behind either.