June 23, 2018

O’Leary: Lighter, quicker Mitchell adding to his repertoire

The Canadian Press

With just over eight minutes left in the third quarter, his team down 11-9 to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Bo Levi Mitchell knew it was time to try his new self out.

He took the snap, surveyed the Ticats’ defence, saw an opening and did something he didn’t do a lot of last year. He ran.

Mitchell picked up 12 yards on the play. Before he could get back in the huddle, he was already hearing it from his teammates.

“They were teasing me, they could tell the difference in how much I was moving around,” Mitchell said on Friday, shortly after the Calgary Stampeders landed in Toronto for their Saturday date with the Argos.

“The one run I had, they said that was more rushing yards than I had all last year. It was fun.”

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A decorated CFL vet with a Most Outstanding Player plaque from 2016 and a Grey Cup ring from 2014, Mitchell enters into his seventh season as something of a new man. Standing in his team’s hotel lobby in a blue three-piece suit and 20-pounds lighter thanks to a better diet and more time in the gym, he kind of looks like a character from Peaky Blinders.

So not only is he entering Mike Reilly territory on the field, he’s doing it off the field as well.

“It was me looking at my body and knowing that it needs to be fixed,” Mitchell said of his new look.

“If you go back and look at film from 2015 and 2016, I had some big legs, I had weight in the stomach that I needed to lose. I tore my knee about two years ago and I just wanted to able to run and train the way I’m used to. The (extra) weight added on and so I fixed the diet, fixed the training regiment to add more running. I’m feeling good.”

Dave Dickenson’s view from the Calgary sideline confirmed all of that last week, too.

“He moved around well,” the Stamps’ head coach said of Mitchell’s Week 1 play.

“He took to heart some areas to improve, which is to be a little more dynamic, running the ball, moving around. I thought he did a great job of that. He extended some plays, took off and got a first-down scrambling. Those were all positives.”

He’s not actually trying to put up Reilly-esque rushing numbers. That’s a relief to Dickenson, who sees a run-happy QB as a double-edged sword. Mitchell would like to re-establish the threat of him running, like he had in 2014, when he put up a modest career-best of 232 yards.

“I mean, yeah (running more), in a sense of just being productive on first down. If things aren’t there, getting three or four yards every now and then and hopefully picking up the first down sometimes when you know a play’s not there,” Mitchell said. “That’s important to me in the CFL as a quarterback.”

“I want him to win games, which he’s doing. I don’t care how, to be honest,” Dickenson said.

“The quarterbacks that run more do get hit more. I watch Mike Reilly play and there aren’t too many people that can absorb those hits. I don’t think Bo and him are quite the same runners, but I do think there are times you’ve got to go and you’ve got to get first downs.”

Bo Levi Mitchell has worked on his diet and workout regiment to lose roughly 20 pounds (Larry MacDougal/CFL.ca)

When a quarterback throws for 4,700 yards and takes his team back to the Grey Cup game for the second year in a row, it’s hard to say he had a down year. But that’s the word that emerges when Mitchell’s 2017 season is discussed. He dealt with a sore shoulder through and said he felt slower when he did try to run with the ball. Then, of course, there’s the Grey Cup loss, which matches the one Calgary suffered in Toronto in 2016 against Ottawa. It didn’t send Mitchell back to the drawing board, but 2017 forced him to look at what he was doing and think about how he could do things better.

“He looks a little slimmer,” Stamps left tackle Derek Dennis said of his QB.

“You can tell he feels a lot better. You can tell, even in practice at times when he’d be hesitant to run, now he’s all gung ho about having an opportunity to show people he can use his legs, that he’s in good shape. He’s feeling good and that’s a good thing for us. I think that makes our team more dangerous.”

Dickenson watched Mitchell complete 17 of his 36 passes for 297 yards, a TD and an interception in the win over Hamilton. He wondered if Mitchell was still feeling things out.

“I think his arm was feeling pretty darn good and he missed a lot of his throws long,” he said. “Whereas last year he was fighting his shoulder the whole year and he was putting a little extra into every throw. Now that he’s got his shoulder feeling better it almost feels like he has a little too much pop in it.”

“We’ve lost the last two Grey Cups and we’re not thinking about it,” Mitchell said. “It’s on to the next year, on to the next game. We put so much, so much focus into every single game.”

Bo Levi Mitchell on Saturday’s Grey Cup rematch

Mitchell and his receivers still figured it out enough to pull away from the Ticats in the fourth. After protecting Mitchell in Calgary in 2015 and 2016, then rejoining the team this season, Dennis knows what Mitchell brings, no matter his health.

“Bo’s Bo. It doesn’t really change much,” he said.

“He’s still one of those quarterbacks where whether he’s 100 per cent or whether he’s 60 or 70 per cent, he’s too good. You know he still has a shot to go out there and beat you.

“I love playing with him. I love going out there and protecting him because of the confidence that he exudes, the presence that he brings to the huddle. You don’t get that from every quarterback. There are probably only a couple of guys in this league that have that type of presence when they get in there with that group.

“He’s one of those guys that he demands a certain presence from the players in the huddle with him. If you know your quarterback’s going out there fighting it’s hard for you not to go out there and give the same effort.”

On the cusp of just the second game of the season, the journey for the Stamps feels like a long one. After the two Grey Cup disappointments, the expectation for this team is nothing less than getting back to the championship game and righting the last two wrongs. It’d be easy to get complacent, but Mitchell says Dickenson’s system keeps everyone focused in the here and now.

“We’ve lost the last two Grey Cups and we’re not thinking about it,” Mitchell said. “It’s on to the next year, on to the next game. We put so much, so much focus into every single game.”

“I feel like last year we had a very similar team, whereas this year we have tons of new players, a lot of new faces,” Dickenson said. “We lost a lot of guys, as far as retirement and guys moving on.

“It just feels so new and we know it’s going to be an extra challenge to accomplish something the other teams have done, which is win the West and get to the Grey Cup.

“I can’t really say that I’m looking back to do something different. I’m trying to get the most out of my guys, squeeze the most out of them to win a football game. If we get back and you want to talk about (the Grey Cup) then, cool. But I know it’s going to be very, very difficult.”