UPDATED: Oct. 24, 2017 at 2:13 p.m.

Patrick Davis was just like most other kids in his neighborhood. Growing up in Gatineau, Quebec, Davis took up hockey at a young age, following his older brother Michael into the nation’s most popular sport. Davis is now 6-foot-5, 320 pounds, and even back then he was much bigger than other players.

Opponents bounced off of Davis, his mother Debbie said, and that he’d get booked with a penalty. After spending almost the entire third period of a game in the penalty box, Davis had enough. Early in elementary school, he told his mom postgame that he wanted to play football.

“Hockey was definitely not his forte,” Debbie said. “He felt appreciated in football.”

But as a Canadian football prospect, Davis inherently drew less attention from football coaches from the United States. To even get Division I looks — Davis dreamt of playing at the highest collegiate level in the United States since he started playing football, Debbie said — he endured a grueling football camp tour before he even got offered a scholarship. Davis’ journey to becoming an offensive lineman at SU (4-4, 2-2 Atlantic Coast) is the story of many Canadian football recruits, as he overcame a vast competitive gap and logistical struggles to even make it on campus.

“High school football in America is way stronger than high school football in Canada,” Davis said. “It’s not even comparable.”

The biggest struggle is fighting for any exposure to U.S. coaches. With such immense concentrations of talent in Southern and Western states, it isn’t worth it for a DI program to scour Canada to possibly come up empty handed, Davis said.

In the Class of 2017, Texas produced 45 players in the ESPN 300. Florida had 50. None were from Canada.

Andy Mendes | Digital Design Editor

So, in the summer of 2016, Davis embarked upon a marathon of 14 football camps in 16 days. His farthest stop from home was about 1,000 miles away in Ames, Iowa. Davis also hit camps in Akron and Toledo, Ohio; Norfolk, Virginia; Buffalo and Syracuse, along with attending several camps with multiple teams present.

Only after Davis made his tour did scholarships begin to come in. Even still, Davis only had four offers: Syracuse, Marshall, Buffalo and North Dakota State, an FCS school.

“Most teams don’t really want to recruit Canadian,” Davis said, “because they don’t know how to bring them. All the paperwork, because they’re not used to doing it.”

That “paperwork” is what the NCAA requires of international student athletes to become eligible. For Davis to play in the U.S., he had to provide academic records from “years nine and up,” proof of graduation, and either an ACT or SAT score. Because Davis also came from Canada, he received a version of this email from the NCAA, outlining the country-specific requirements to become eligible.

All of the NCAA’s stipulations are in addition to the U.S. State Department F1 student visa required of any international college student, athlete or not. Syracuse was one of the schools that helped Davis through the red tape, he said.

On a more basic level than bureaucracy, there’s also the factor that most coaches don’t recruit Canada. SU head coach Dino Babers pledged to be different.

“I think it’s an untapped area,” Babers said on National Signing Day in February. “I think it’s an area that’s obviously very close to Syracuse University. I think it’s something that we’re going to try to take advantage of as long as I have a term here.”

So far, Babers has brought in Davis and Tyrell Richards, a three-star linebacker from Brampton, Ontario, in the 2017 recruiting class. They are the first Canadians playing for Syracuse since 2012, and were the No. 3 and 4 ranked prospects from Canada, respectively, according to ESPN.

The chasm between Canadian and U.S. talent creates a problem in film evaluations, too. Because the talent level is generally lower in Canada, Davis said, and because coaches usually are unfamiliar with Canadian players, they can’t accurately gauge a potential recruit based off of film.

For coaches to understand how good a player is, they want to see Canadian prospects in person, usually at camps rife with players from the states. This is partly why Davis took part in over a dozen camps in less than three weeks.

“You gotta earn your place,” Davis said. “The coaches here know the players from high school in the States, but they don’t know any players in Canada.”

Andy Mendes | Digital Design Editor

This may be changing at SU, both due to Babers’ promise to look north and partially because of geography. In a straight line, Syracuse is 168 miles from Toronto, the seventh-most populous city in North America.

Debbie found out the true nature of SU’s proximity to Canada. New York’s college team may just as easily be Canada’s college team.

“It’s actually closer for me to go see (Patrick’s) games in Syracuse than it was when he was doing his post secondary,” Debbie said.

Despite these challenges, Canadian recruits have landed at other DI programs. Richards and Davis at Syracuse, Benjamin St. Juste, a cornerback from Montreal, plays for Michigan and Texas has tight end Blake Whiteley, who grew up in British Columbia.

It is evident that, even coming from Canada, playing DI football at a high level is possible. What it ultimately comes down to is players putting the onus on themselves, Davis said, to go and get recruited. A coach may come calling, but rarely with an offer. Usually it’s a camp invite and a chance to prove one’s mettle against the known commodities in the U.S.

In the end, though, every single Canadian player that makes a DI roster can open up a spot for more in the future.

“Each year, (coaches are) looking since we’re not far from the border here in Syracuse,” Davis said. “I know coaches go down there each year and see what they got. If there are players that they love, they’ll invite them to a camp and they’ll have to prove what they have in camp.

“If they like them, they’ll offer them.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, DI football was misstated as D1 football. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on October 24, 2017 at 1:06 am

Contact Andrew: aegraham@syr.edu | @A_E_Graham