The past two seasons rank among the top three of his Hall-of-Fame-bound career, so in the end it made perfect sense — for everybody — for him to return for two more.
And that should trigger some other personnel dominoes as the Tiger-Cats have signalled that they are already moving definitively into 2026… and beyond.
Ticat Nation received an early holiday present Thursday when the club, and their record-breaking quarterback, announced that pending free agent Bo Levi Mitchell has been extended for another two years — his fourth and fifth — in black and gold.
After the Cats’ heartbreaking last-second loss to Montréal in the CFL East Final, and again during Grey Cup week in Winnipeg, Mitchell emphasized that he and his family — his wife Madison and their young daughters Ele and Lakelyn — required some time and distance from football’s fog of war to objectively analyse whether he should retire from the game.
At the time he sounded as if there was still business unfinished — as in a Grey Cup for Hamilton — and that he didn’t feel like he’d played his last game, but that he and his family needed the clarity of being away from the heat of action to make a truly informed decision.
That decision was made fairly quickly and likely will influence other potential free agents, including those whose Ticats contracts are expiring and those on other teams who might be considering Hamilton as a future destination when free agency opens in February.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t say it was too difficult,” Mitchell said. “It’s just that you’ve got to cross the T’s and dot the I’s. Madi and I have had conversations about retiring for years now. Not that we’ve thought about retiring for years, but that we’ve always talked about what does retirement look like? How do you feel at the end of a season? What does your body feel like? Are you going to be able to play with the girls? Are you going to be able to go coach their basketball teams and get up and down the court?
“I’m very active with my girls. We get on the trampoline, we run around. I want to coach them in every sport they do. And I want to be able to move my body around when I’m doing that. Luckily I play for a guy in Scott Milanovich who has kept our team very, very healthy over the last two years with changing the way we do training camps, the way we attack practice every day.
“He understands his team in a way that I think a lot of people don’t. He can see when he’s pushing you a little bit too much, he can see when you’re not being pushed enough and he’ll attack it. He attacks the problem. So it’s exciting to be back.
“Madi and I had a lot of talks and came to the decision. She said, ‘If you want to be back on this team, I want you to be back. You have an amazing team, an amazing organization, amazing people around you.’ And she could tell, as soon as the season was over, that I didn’t feel like I was taking the pads off for the last time. So I was very, very excited to make this decision.”
With Wednesday’s announcement that shutdown cornerback Jamal Peters had also re-upped for two more years, the Ticats now have enthusiastic superstars locked in on both sides of the ball. Mitchell knows from his personal experience that can have an effect on other players’ decision-making.
“There are a lot of factors that go into it. It helps having a guy like (managing partner) Scott Mitchell at the helm who is very personable. He’s not an owner you can’t talk to. He’s a guy you can walk up to, have a conversation, sit down, have a beer after the season and talk things out. We’re very lucky to have a guy running our organization who is very hands-on.”
In his final two seasons in Calgary, Mitchell suffered pectoral, shoulder and fibula injuries that cost him 14 games, then suffered an adductor injury in his second start as a Ticat. He missed six games, then on the final play of the first game of his return, in Ottawa, he fractured his lower right leg, missed the rest of the season and started 2024’s training camp in a walking boot.
He had already been working closely with strength and conditioning coach Marcellus Bowman but during the 2023–24 off-season that commitment went into overdrive. He changed his diet, the way he trained and resculpted his body, growing much stronger and admitting that, at then 33, he needed to make some concessions to growing older. He continued that the following season, working on his legs and mobility and was able to move out of the pocket more quickly and also make faster evasive moves, stepping up into the pocket for longer decision-making time.
He was also becoming more attuned to Milanovich, a brilliant handler of quarterbacks, and what the head coach required from him. Even though Milanovich benched him in August of 2024 after some questionable decisions, Mitchell appreciated that it was about making him better, not punishing him, and appreciated his head coach’s direct honesty.
Since he returned to the huddle as a replacement for injured Taylor Powell that August, his success has been remarkable. The Ticats missed the 2024 playoffs but Mitchell led the league in a number of categories, threw for the most yards of his career, matched his best TD-pass total, and was a finalist for the CFL’s Most Outstanding Player Award which in the opinion of this corner he should have won.
And he was even better in 2025, with the third-highest passing total of his career, the best TD-to-interception ratio of his 13 seasons, the most passing attempts of his career, his first rushing touchdown in a decade, and delivering 14 touchdown strikes to marquee free agent Kenny Lawler, more than double the all-CFLer’s previous career high, and was again an MOP finalist. He also soared into eighth place on the all-time career passing list with the first back-to-back 5,000-yard seasons of his career.
And the mutual respect and comfort level between him and Milanovich has kept deepening and broadening.
“I think there’s probably a multitude of reasons why it kind of all comes together,” Mitchell said. “As an athlete, it’s a lot like raising a baby. It takes a village. You need your family around, you need a great support system around you, you need staff who care about you, you need a trainer who cares about your body enough to take the time to think about you as an individual and not you as one of 60 people. Marcellus goes out of his way all the time to make sure that, ‘Man, how’s your program working for you?’ You have a training staff that all care so much about you. Coaches like Jarryd Baines, who drop what they’re doing to have that conversation with you.
“Scott (Milanovich) isn’t correcting me because he doesn’t like the way I play. He’s correcting me because he knows that I can get better and I can become a different quarterback and I can do something that’s special. And it’s just special, honestly, to be able to play for a play-caller like him, the amount of work he puts in and just the amount he cares about this team. He expects to win, right? He just hates to lose. And I think all the great winners do. So I think just being with Marcellus, being with Scott, getting the freedom of being with some of the guys on the team that we’ve had these past two years, it’s been just special to be a part of.”
With Lawler, Kiondré Smith and Tim White, the 2025 Ticats had three 1,000-yard receivers for just the second time in franchise history. And it was the first time — dating right back to the merging of the Tigers and Wildcats to form the modern Ticats in 1950 — that the franchise has had three 1,000-yard receivers plus a 1,000-yard running back (Greg Bell). Bell and White are pending free agents and presumably high on the Ticats’ target list.
So how much better can this offence get?
“When I look back at film, when I talk to O (football operations president Orlondo Steinauer), when I talk to players, it’s ‘How can we improve?’ Obviously the more film you have on us, the more things you’re going to have to try to defend us. You can’t drop back and throw Kenny a jump ball every play, although I would love to. I’m sure the fans would love that, and we’d be successful doing it. But defences are awesome. They’re able to make adjustments and make it very tough on you as an offence.
“And I think it’s about the mental part of the game. Obviously I will continue the physical aspect of everything I’ve been doing these last two seasons, but also attacking the mental game in a different way to be just that much sharper every day.
“Scott says that in order to change the way that you work, in your mind every single day you have to think about taking care of the football. It’s got to be every single throw, from warmups to walkthroughs to Skelly (seven-on-seven passing drills) to just on the sideline. He says it to everybody. Take care of the ball. So I had to change my mindset. I’ve always been a guy that’s a bit of a gunslinger who wants to fit the ball into windows and put it over the top too much. But I think being with Scott has just taught me to take in what they give you and create different opportunities and those big ones will come. So, attack the film and really just see if there are opportunities to use my legs to get us into 2nd-and-7 rather than trying to fit it in a window and be 2nd-and-10. Obviously I’m going to complete some of those, but some of those would turn into picks.”
Mitchell says fans and analysts should temper themselves on specific numerical expectations for what can be a very lethal offence. Don’t necessarily assume the Cats will throw for 6,000 yards and have a 1,500-yard runner because they have much of the same group back together. He points out that he threw for 155 fewer yards in 2025 than the season before, “but I would say that this year I was much, much better. It’s not always about yardage: it’s about points; it’s about time of possession; it’s about penalties. There’s so much that goes into it.”
While the Ticats had a gruelling schedule last season — three of their four longest road trips came in a summer stretch of 21 days that covered over 20,000 air kilometres and included games in four different cities — Mitchell embraced the 2025 schedule, especially the road work.
But he also likes what he sees in this week’s schedule release.
“I think it’s awesome,” he said. “I think that’s one of the fun, unique things about the CFL: figuring out different ways to play the same eight teams over and over again and make it fun and make it interesting. So I’m looking forward to it.
“It’s home-heavy in the beginning, home-heavy at the end, which is obviously awesome. And it attacks some of the away games. I love away games, so I don’t mind when they are.
“We were 5-and-4 at home which obviously is something that I would love to see us be better at. And I think it’s awesome that we get to start the season at home in front of our fans.”
