Ex-CFL star Mathieu Betts thankful for second NFL chance with Detroit Lions

Mathieu Betts got his first taste of the NFL in 2019, when he signed with the Chicago Bears as an undrafted free agent and spent four months with the team.

The Bears cut Betts that August, and 10 or so days later, with no other NFL interest to speak of, Betts embarked on a CFL career that took a brief detour into teaching and ended with him being the most feared pass rusher in Canada.

Betts said Friday he was content to spend the rest of his career in the CFL when things did not initially work out with the Bears. But he had a breakout 18-sack season last fall that put him back on NFL radars and he signed a futures deal with the Detroit Lions in February; in Detroit, he’s expected to compete for a job this fall as a pass-rushing outside linebacker.

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“I hope he gets 18 sacks like he did in the CFL,” Lions assistant general manager Ray Agnew said Friday. “The best thing about him, when you watch him on tape — and it is what it is, it’s the CFL — but the guy wins. The guy gets to the quarterback, so it’s going to be exciting to see when he starts to go against NFL guys, to see how he plays. That’s the only chance you’ll get to judge him.”

At 29 years old, Betts is the oldest player in the weekend's Lions rookie minicamp, where he’s sharing a field with a handful of players who were in high school when he got his first professional sack with the Edmonton Eskimos in 2019.

Betts spent half a season with Edmonton before the coronavirus pandemic temporarily derailed his football dreams. When the CFL shut down in 2020, he found work as a physical education teacher in Quebec City, near where he went to college at Laval University.

“I was out of a job, so I had bills to pay,” Betts said.

Along with a paycheck, the job gave Betts access to the school’s weight room, which he used to stay in football shape while most of Canada was in lockdown.

He played as a backup with the Eskimos when the CFL returned in 2021, then signed with the B.C. Lions as a free agent in 2022, where he blossomed under defensive line coach John Bowman, a CFL Hall of Fame pass rusher, the past two seasons.

After a seven-sack season in 2022, Betts averaged a sack a game last season and forced three fumbles to win the CFL’s Most Outstanding Defensive Player Award.

“He was great, man,” said Lions rookie Gio Manu, who attended several B.C. Lions games while playing down the road at the University of British Columbia. “He’s a dog, man. I think he led in sacks in the league and he got defensive player of the year. … He’s a great guy and I’m happy Detroit got him cause it’ll be sick seeing him and Aidan Hutchinson on the field one day.”

Betts said Bowman was a big influence on his playing career just “letting me do what I do good, not telling me what I could and could not do.”

Under Bowman’s tutelage, Betts said he added counter moves to his pass rushing repertoire and learned how to better work in tandem with his linemates.

The Lions saw a high-motor player in the scouting process and, as one of three teams to bring Betts in for a workout in December, won him over with the culture in their building.

“The thing about him is that, man, that guy plays hard,” Lions general manager Brad Holmes said in March. “He plays like how we want to play and obviously with all that production (we thought) let’s go just take a shot and see where it goes.”

Betts is taking essentially the same approach with his second go-round in the NFL.

He said his time in Chicago gave him a baseline of what to expect in the NFL, but that “feels like forever” ago and his success the past two seasons in Canada “helped me more” as a player.

Several CFL players have enjoyed successful NFL careers, including, most prominently, Cameron Wake, who had 39 sacks over two seasons with the B.C. Lions before racking up 100½ sacks in 11 seasons with the Miami Dolphins and Tennessee Titans. But Betts said that’s not a proof of concept his experiment with the Lions will work, either.

His goals in Detroit are more simple — build on the good things he’s done and see where things go from there.

“It wasn’t my plan to come back to the NFL or objective, or I wasn’t waking up in the morning saying I’m going back,” he said. “I was trying to be the best football player for my team, and it worked out well for me, so that’s what I’m focused on here right now is, be the best football player for the Detroit Lions, and if I do that, I know good things will happen.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on X and Instagram at @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: CFL's Mathieu Betts thankful for second NFL chance with Detroit Lions