Two Future Hall of Fame Quarterbacks Go Head to Head on Friday
Even in a nine-team league, you don’t see this as often as you might expect, so it’s worth enjoying it for its own sake.
Friday night at Tim Hortons Field, the two hottest teams in the CFL—both of whom started the season with four straight losses—and are currently ranked 1-2 in league power rankings, will try to extend lengthy winning streaks.
Each will be led by a quarterback in his mid-30s who, unequivocally, will be selected for the Canadian Football Hall of Fame as soon as he’s eligible. And each of those quarterbacks has withstood doubt—externally and internally—in a season where they’ve faltered at times but have caught fire as the calendar turns to “football time.”
Bo Levi Mitchell has been brilliant the past month since being quickly pressed into service after temporarily losing his starting job to Taylor Powell. As the Ticats have built a four-game winning streak to go to 6-9 on the season and gather jet-stream momentum, Mitchell has thrown for a stunning 1323 yards with seven TD passes and just two interceptions. He’s coming off a game in which he struggled for most of the opening 30 minutes but rallied his team by completing 29 of his final 30 pass attempts to overcome a 16-0 halftime deficit on the way to a 32-29 overtime victory against the BC Lions, right in Vancouver.
Just a couple of hours before Mitchell powered the Ticats to their heart-stopping win, Collaros threw six touchdown passes, with no interceptions and 423 yards in a rout of the Edmonton Elks. Like Mitchell, he’s overcome a 2024 propensity for interceptions—they each have 14 picks, most in the CFL—with only two in the last four games.
Mitchell leads the CFL with 4359 passing yards, 800 more than the runner-up, who just happens to be Collaros. One difference is that Mitchell also leads the league in TD passes at 26, while Collaros has just 15 after totalling 70 strikes for majors over the previous two seasons. But counter-balancing the difference is that Collaros is gaining traction at the right time and also has at his disposal Brady Oliveira, the best running back in the league and a Most Outstanding Player candidate. (Mitchell has inched into that discussion too).
They lead offences which are ranked first (Winnipeg) and second (Hamilton) on first downs, so they’ve got thick playbooks –and a plethora of good receivers–to work with on second down. The last loss the Ticats suffered was a heartbreaker in Winnipeg in which Mitchell led to the team to a late score, but somehow Collaros struck quickly to enable a winning field goal on the final play.
Both teams have won four straight since then.
Ticat head coach Scott Milanovich has coached Anthony Calvillo and Ricky Ray, both of whom are already in the Hall of Fame and, briefly with Collaros in Toronto, and now he has Mitchell here. So he knows what goes into a pivot becoming a Hall of Famer.
“This is at least the fourth with AC, Bo, Ricky and Zach and hopefully Trevor (Harris) maybe makes it too,” Milanovich said today. “And they’re all different, but what’s consistent is that they’ve all got accuracy, they make good decisions, they’re clutch in big games, they trust their teammates and trust what’s going on out there. All four of those guys I just named are unbelievably different players. It takes time to figure out each one of them.
“I had Zach only a short time. At that time he was really a playmaker and Bo has some similarities to him. I don’t know the exact numbers of these two guys, but they’ve both won multiple Grey Cups. Touchdowns, yards, wins, all the above. Both are great guys, both true professionals, who love the game, true competitors, and great leaders.
“It’s definitely a treat for the fans and it’s good for the CFL, no doubt about it.”
CATS CLAUSES: The Ticats released wide receiver/returner Jordan Byrd today and also released WR Jalon Calhoun … the team signed American receiver Isaiah Wooden, who spent time with the BC Lions and in the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and LA Chargers, and 6-foot-3, 215-pound receiver Daniel Arias who was born in the Dominican Republic, raised in Washington State and played college at Colorado before spending time with the Arizona Cardinals and Kansas City Chiefs …the Ticats’ “Build-It-Better-Coach-of-the Week’ celebrating a youth coach for every home game this week honours Sierra McPhail who coaches at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School.