What More Does Trevor Harris Have To Do?

By Chris Lawton

Trevor Harris is underrated. There I said it. And I know it sounds ridiculous when he is recognised by players and media as one of the best in the CFL. He was top 10 on the CFL top 50 list after all. But still, I think he is undervalued, underrated or perhaps it’s best stated as underappreciated at times by fans of the CFL. Before the angry hordes of keyboard warriors with their metaphorical pitchforks come for me for being so ridiculous let me explain.   

He just won the Grey Cup. He was named MVP. He set a Grey Cup record for completion percentage that may never be beaten. He led his team to a first-place finish in the West, quarterbacked a late-game drive for the ages in the Western Final, and capped it all by carving up the Montreal Alouettes like a man who had everything figured out a long time ago.

And yet, ask a casual CFL fan to name the league’s best quarterback, and Trevor Harris might still be the third or fourth name out of their mouth.

That tells you everything you need to know about the man. Is it his quiet demeanour? His more reserved leadership? His consistent professionalism rather than great ups and downs creating a more compelling narrative? I think of all of those it’s the latter that matters most here.

There is a particular kind of excellence that the sporting world struggles to celebrate. That is the quiet, efficient, repeatable kind. The kind that doesn’t come with a redemption arc or a marketing campaign or a record-chasing storyline to hang a feature on. Trevor Harris has been operating at an elite level for years, and the CFL conversation has consistently found reasons to look elsewhere.

In 2024, the story was starting of Davis Alexander chasing an unprecedented run of wins to start a career in Montreal. Bo Levi Mitchell was staging a career renaissance in Hamilton that had everyone talking about a third MOP award. And the league, understandably, was leaning into the Nathan Rourke narrative; a Canadian-born quarterback as the face of a league that had long dreamed of one. These are compelling storylines, and none of them are wrong to discuss. All of them are outstanding quarterbacks who absolutely deserve their recognition.

But while those conversations were filling column inches, Harris, in a season disrupted by injury, quietly set a Saskatchewan single season record for completion percentage at 72.4%, earned West Division All-CFL honours, and led the league in quarterback rating. His Head Coach arrived in Regina having heard good things, and later admitted the reality was something else: Harris was much better than he’d been told. Whilst Harris and his offensive coordinator found the perfect symbiosis in green and white.

That is the Trevor Harris experience. You hear he’s good. Then you watch him, and you realise the half of it hasn’t been said.

The statistics, when consider them, are quietly staggering. His career completion percentage of 71% is the second-best in CFL history. Second best. Ever. In a league that has been played for over a century, only one quarterback in history has been more consistently accurate with the football than Trevor Harris. Oh, and Harris has thrown the ball almost 4500 times in his CFL career so this isn’t a small sample size.

In 2025, he led the league in completion percentage at 73.6%. Which meant he was breaking his own Saskatchewan record, whilst also throwing for 4,549 yards and 24 touchdowns in 16 starts. Pro Football Focus rated him the highest-graded player in the entire CFL at mid-season, with an overall grade of 91.6. He was named the league’s top offensive player five separate times across the season. He recorded 12 consecutive games with a completion percentage of 70% or better too. Just another CFL record tied to his accuracy.

But beyond the completion numbers, what PFF’s mid-season analysis captured was something more revealing. Harris led the league with 49% of his throws going beyond the sticks, had the fastest average time to throw in the league at 2.21 seconds, and posted the best big-time throw percentage at 7.8%. Their assessment was direct: there is no quarterback in the CFL better at quickly reading what a defence is doing and making the right throw.

That is not a compliment about accuracy. That is a compliment about football intelligence. About processing. About seeing the game one beat ahead of everyone else. Trevor Harris is a drop back quarterback operating at the absolute peak of the position. And doing that, we should note, remarkably, in his late thirties.

The Grey Cup told the story that the regular season had been building to. Saskatchewan beat Montreal 25-17, and Harris completed 23 of 27 passes for 302 yards. That 85.2% completion percentage is a Grey Cup record. He was, of course, named MVP. A week earlier in the Western Final, with 63 seconds left on the clock, he had engineered a seven-play, 76-yard touchdown drive that put the Roughriders into the championship game. When the pressure was at its absolute highest, Harris was at his very best.

His head coach said nothing about it being a surprise. This was what they had come to expect.

And if you want a reminder that this isn’t new, cast your mind back to November 2018. At TD Place in Ottawa, Harris put on one of the great individual playoff performances in CFL history. Going 29-of-32 against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Eastern Final, he threw six touchdown passes, a CFL playoff record, with passes going to 10 different receivers, completing the afternoon at a stunning 90.6% as the Redblacks won 46-27 to reach the Grey Cup. The record for most passing touchdowns in a playoff game still stands. That was nearly eight years ago. The precision under pressure has always been there.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for the Ottawa RedBlacks. They let Harris walk after that 2018 season, and it’s tempting to wonder whether the Grey Cup loss to Calgary, a game they reached in large part because of Harris, clouded some judgements about where the blame belonged. Harris did his job that year. He got Ottawa to the Grey Cup with one of the great quarterback performances in playoff history. What followed in Edmonton wasn’t his undoing.

Since his departure, Ottawa’s search for a stable quarterback solution has been a long and winding one. The Redblacks have cycled through options, endured multiple missed playoffs, and headed into 2026 having handed the starting job to Jake Maier. Who, in a neat twist of fate, served as Harris’s backup on last year’s Grey Cup-winning Saskatchewan team. Maier is a capable quarterback, and this isn’t meant as a slight. But the contrast is hard to ignore. The man Ottawa let go is still playing the best football of his career. His backup has become their starter. That is surely a measure of just what Trevor Harris has to offer.

Part of what makes Harris easy to overlook is that he has never been the league’s great project or its great hope. He didn’t arrive with fanfare. He doesn’t have the narrative hooks that make for easy content. He came up through Edinboro University in Division II, went undrafted by the NFL, played Arena Football, and found his way to the CFL in 2012. There was no moment of arrival, just a long accumulation of being very, very good.

In a media landscape that rewards the new and the dramatic, a quarterback who is simply excellent like Harris, year after year, team after team, without being super flashy, can get lost in the noise.

Also consider the broader picture of his career. Three Grey Cup rings, with Toronto, Ottawa, and now Saskatchewan as the starter he always deserved to be. Team MOP nominations at four different franchises. All-CFL honours in both divisions. And an honesty from the man himself that is rather disarming: he told reporters last season that he had never had more fun playing football. At 39.  So how is he going two weeks into his age-40 season now?

That is the thing: it’s happening again right now. He is playing with surgical precision and most people are talking about other pivots first.

Saskatchewan opened their 2026 season with a 31-27 win over the BC Lions, and Harris was sensational  int that one. 30 of 36 for 417 yards and three touchdowns, engineering yet another late comeback when the game tightened. A week later, he guided the Riders to a 40-37 overtime win in Calgary, again leading the decisive drive when the pressure was greatest. Two games in, Saskatchewan are 2-0, Harris is carving teams up with the same surgical efficiency that carried them to a championship last November, and the CFL conversation has moved on to Davis Alexander’s streak ending in the pursuit of history and Mitchell’s continued renaissance in Hamilton.

Again. Both deserve the attention. Neither is being discussed unfairly. But Harris just led a championship drive in overtime and collected a CFL Player of the Week award for Week 2, and somehow it barely registers compared to some of the other QB stories out there.

So, is “underrated” even the right word? He has won awards. He has his rings. He was Grey Cup MVP six months ago. Perhaps “under-celebrated” is closer. Or perhaps “taken for granted.”

What feels true is that the wider CFL conversation has consistently found a more convenient star to put at the front of the story, and the ever-professional Harris has gone about his business anyway, setting records and winning games while the spotlight found someone else. He doesn’t seem to mind. He is too busy being the best drop back quarterback in the league.

He entered 2026 with 37,697 career passing yards, ninth on the all-time completions list, and a career completion rate that only one man in history has bettered. The Roughriders are 2-0 behind him and look every bit like a team chasing back-to-back titles. And the man himself said it plainly last week: he believes the best football of this offence is still in front of them.

Trevor Harris has, it turns out, been exactly what the numbers always said he was. The question was never whether he was good enough.

The question was whether we were paying close enough attention.

CHRIS LAWTON

CFL ANALYST

Chris originally started following the NFL with the ‘first wave’ of fans when it was shown on Channel 4 in the 1980’s. He has been a keen supporter of the Miami Dolphins since 1983. Chris first encountered the CFL in 2016 and instantly fell in love with the Canadian game. He has been writing about the CFL 2017. Chris has a degree in history, postgraduate degree in librarianship and can be found on twitter as @CFLfanUK

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