A year ago, Bo Levi Mitchell was approaching the 2025 Canadian Football League season as if it would be his last.
At 35 years of age, Mitchell had accomplished enough to put himself on the list of Canadian Football League all-time greats. He owned two Grey Cup rings from his days in Calgary and a good chunk of the CFL record book, with an assured spot in Hall of Fame awaiting him one day.
He was ready to walk away on his own terms and move on to the next phase of his life once the season was done.
Or so he thought.
His plan changed the instant the Montreal Alouettes hit a 45-yard field goal with no time remaining at the end of last November’s East Division Final, crushing the Tiger-Cats’ Grey Cup hopes and extending the league’s longest Grey Cup drought into its second quarter century.
Suddenly, walking away just didn’t feel right.
“I get in the locker room and that feeling sort of set in,” Mitchell said in a recent interview with TSN. “It just didn’t feel like the end. And that’s when I told my wife it just doesn’t feel like it’s over. I don’t know that it will, ever. I’m sure your body or mind will tell you at some point. But my body felt good, my mind - I feel strong. You know, I’m loving the game and I know how close we are as an organization. I know [the Grey Cup] is within our grasp.”
The Alouettes are back in Hamilton tonight to open the 2026 season and Mitchell is where he didn’t expect to be, armed with a new two-year contract and a renewed determination to end the drought.
“That’s another huge reason of why you stay,” Mitchell said. “When Calgary traded my rights to Hamilton [after the 2022 season] and I first sat down with some of the upper brass of the organization, that was a big reason why I wanted to be here.
“You think about your legacy and what you want to leave on this game and the number one thought on my mind was, ‘If I could bring a Grey Cup to Hamilton that’s a different status of what I could be.’”
Mitchell arrived in Hamilton in 2023 wanting to leave a similar mark on the Tiger-Cats as he had on the Stampeders, determined not to end his career bouncing from one team to another. But the challenges he faced during his first two seasons in black and gold made it seem unlikely that would ever happen.
He missed two chunks of the 2023 regular season due to injury, playing just six games, fuelling skepticism that he could remain healthy enough to play through a full year.
He returned for the end of the season but was benched for the Tiger-Cats’ playoff loss to Montreal. Afterwards, Mitchell stood at his locker and surmised openly that his days in Hamilton were probably done after one season.
That off-season the Ticats promoted Scott Milanovich, who had stepped in to become offensive co-ordinator midway through the year, to head coach for 2024. Soon after Mitchell learned the door would be open for him to return.
“You feel like you’ve got one foot out the door,” said Mitchell, who acknowledges not being 100 per cent healthy at the time of his playoff benching. “But after those feelings are gone, I can I sit down and have a conversation with Scott and told him, ‘If I can have a full training camp with you as my guy, I think we can make this happen.’
“He was open with me and said, ‘There will be competition between you and Taylor Powell … I knew that if I showed up healthy, I’d win the job.”
Mitchell did win the job, although the challenges of adapting to playing in Milanovich’s system led to some high drama when he was benched after throwing an interception in a game against Montreal on Aug 8.
For a player like Mitchell, who’d had so much success playing quarterback a certain way, adapting to a new way of doing things was difficult.
“I had done things a certain way for so long and it had worked,” Mitchell said. “I’ll compare it to being a point guard who is maybe used to scoring and is now being asked to pass the ball. So, instead of running around and trying to make a guy miss and then telling a guy, like point your finger and telling him to turn up, you know, throwing a deep bolt for a touchdown … just being more efficient.”
Milanovich would drill Mitchell while the two watched film together, not only showing him instances of him doing things the wrong way, but also of the other quarterbacks getting it right. But after Mitchell threw that interception in the August game against the Alouettes, Milanovich’s patience expired. In a move the coach later called a “no-brainer” he sat Mitchell in favour of Powell, presumably for the rest of the season.
For the second time in less than a year, it looked as though Mitchell’s days as a Tiger-Cat might be over.
What followed has proved to be one of the most unlikely career turnarounds in CFL history.
Powell suffered an injury during his first game after Mitchell’s benching, making Mitchell the starter again.
From that point on he was a different quarterback, leading Hamilton on a late-season run, playing well enough to become the East Division’s nominee for Most Outstanding Player and throwing for the second-most yards in his career.
“If I didn’t respect Scott, and it was coming from a different voice, I’d probably feel differently about it,” Mitchell said. “If it came from a guy that I didn’t respect, I didn’t believe in. I’ve seen who he’s been with in the past. He coaches the quarterback the hardest of anybody on the team, and it’s for a reason.”
Mitchell carried that momentum into last season and had one of the best years of his career, finishing with career highs in touchdown passes (36), pass attempts (626) and completions (428) while throwing for more than 5,000 yards in back-to-back seasons for the first time in his career. His 68 touchdown throws the past two seasons are two more than any two-year combination he had in Calgary.
He also led the league in completions, touchdown passes and yards, with an interception percentage of 1.8, which tied for second best.
By reinventing himself under Milanovich’s tutelage the past two seasons, Mitchell has achieved his goal of achieving greatness with two different franchises at two very different stages of his career, which is rare territory indeed.
All that’s left is to leave his mark on Steeltown in the way he aspired to when he arrived.
“We’re all very aware of the drought, we talk about it,” Mitchell said. “We’ve got the opportunity to go out there and change that. We have an opportunity to change the history of our franchise.”
