Young quarterbacks in Texas don't dream of Canadian Football League glory. If you're the quarterback at Katy High School and you're goofing around on the field with your wide receiver buddies after practice, you're not dropping back and saying to yourself, "This is for the Grey Cup ..."
But life pulls you where it pulls you, and for Bo Levi Mitchell, the road out of Katy, Texas, led to Calgary, Alberta, where he's become a bona fide CFL superstar.
Three months past his 27th birthday, as Mitchell readies the Calgary Stampeders for 2017, he's coming off a 5,385-yard season and a CFL Most Outstanding Player Award. In 2014, he led the Stampeders to a Grey Cup and earned that game's MVP Award. He set a CFL record for best record to start a career when he went 12-1 in his first season as a starter.
Things are going so well, you figure maybe the Texas kid has flushed all of those pesky NFL dreams out of his system, right?
Wrong.
"I think about it all the time," Mitchell said in a phone interview earlier this month. "Just now in training camp, there were seven or eight scouts who came in. I know there's been some talk in the NFL about me. When my time comes, the NFL has been my dream since I was a kid. I'll take that shot."
That shot isn't likely to come until after Mitchell's contract expires, which is two seasons from now. By then, if his CFL career trajectory continues on its current track, he admits it'll be tempting to stick around.
"It would be hard to pass up the opportunity to be the best ever to play in the CFL," Mitchell said.
But it would be harder for him to pass up a real NFL opportunity -- the kind he actually dreamed about when he was a kid in Katy. Back then, former NFL coach June Jones was recruiting Mitchell to play for him at Hawaii and eventually SMU. A sophomore-year injury at SMU led him to transfer to Eastern Washington, where he got the chance to throw passes to his wide receiver brother and meet a number of CFL players who showed him what life could be like north of the border.
"It felt like home," Mitchell says of Eastern Washington. "It felt like high school football to me. Guys weren't there trying to be the big-name guys, out for the advancement of their careers. They were just there to play football together. Pingpong table in the locker room, a lot of emphasis on the fun aspects of it all, the camaraderie."
He won a national title in his first year at Eastern Washington, and in his second, he won the Walter Payton Award as the best offensive player in the FCS. But when it came time to talk about life after college, Mitchell and his coaches confronted some of the realities and the alternatives.
"My head coach sat me down and gave it to me straight," Mitchell said. "He said, 'The book on you is, you're 6-foot, you throw with a glove on, you haven't played the best competition... You're looking at the sixth-seventh round, probably undrafted.' He talked to me about (former Eastern Washington QB) Matt Nichols, who took the CFL path. He said, 'I think the CFL would be a good spot for you.'"
The only team that called Mitchell's agent about a summer tryout was the Houston Texans. While it was tempting, Mitchell says he didn't want to go somewhere to "just be a camp arm and be able to say I got a taste of the NFL." Instead, he put on some CFL tape. Knowing the Stampeders held his rights, he watched Drew Tate, who was Calgary's quarterback at the time.
"I thought, 'I'm better than that guy,'" Mitchell said. "I mean, no offense to him, but just watching the tape, I knew I had more to offer."
Which is how he feels about the NFL. He may not be on the NFL's radar yet, but Mitchell believes he has something to offer a team -- as a player, not a ball cap-wearing backup. He's worked out with former CFL and NFL quarterback Jeff Garcia, current Bills quarterback Tyrod Taylor and other NFL types, including Matt McGloin, Mark Sanchez and his idol, Drew Brees.
He likes his life in the CFL, and while he's not complacent and he wants to know whether he can make it in the NFL, he swears it has to be the right NFL opportunity if it's going to pull him away from Calgary.
"If it was the perfect situation -- if a team wanted me to come out there and take a legitimate shot at a job, then yes," Mitchell said. "But not just to say I went to the NFL to hold a clipboard or be a journeyman. I want to play football.
"I know it's not the easiest thing. I've seen a lot of guys attempt to do it. But I feel I can play. I feel like I can be a Warren Moon, a Garcia, a Doug Flutie, a guy who comes from the CFL and plays in the league for a long time."