Why Eagles CB Quinyon Mitchell spurned the SEC to take an unlikely path from Toledo to the NFL’s first round

Quinyon Mitchell spent the last couple of months bouncing between Toledo’s campus, the Detroit metropolitan airport, and numerous NFL training complexes.

The Eagles’ first-round cornerback spent some time in Florida preparing for the NFL scouting combine with XPE Performance but returned to his home base in March to train in a familiar environment between top-30 visits.

Toledo coach Jason Candle wasn’t all that surprised to see Mitchell, one of the best players in the program’s recent history, attending team meetings every day at 7:15 a.m. since his return. But when Mitchell arrived for training with his former teammates one morning fresh off the tarmac, even Candle didn’t expect it.

“He takes a top-30 visit, gets on a 6 a.m. flight back from his visit and lands in Detroit,” Candle told The Inquirer. “He drives 45 minutes from the Detroit airport and he’s down here in a 10 a.m. workout running with our guys. That’s really kind of all you need to know. That sums up Quinyon Mitchell right there in that story. He just consistently is motivated internally, he’s not worried about the extra stuff on the outside, and he just continues to improve.”

Mitchell finding comfort in Toledo’s campus during the pre-draft process makes sense. Candle’s staff showed loyalty to him as a three-star recruit out of Willistown, Fla. even after most teams were scared off by Mitchell needing to grayshirt for a year because of his poor grades in high school.

Mitchell repaid that loyalty last summer, sticking with the Rockets even as Power Five programs swarmed, trying to entice him to enter the transfer portal. On Thursday, he became the first Toledo player taken in the first round in more than 20 years and a rarity in the modern college football landscape: a first-round prospect who played his entire career at a Group of 5 school.

“Toledo just stuck with me through the whole process,” Mitchell said Friday. “Gave me a fair chance to play ball when nobody else wanted to. So when the time came around, it was a no-brainer. I wasn’t going anywhere, I wasn’t leaving, no matter how much money or who came to offer. That’s why I went to Toledo and that’s why I stayed.”

Gauging the intensity of Mitchell’s recruitment from outside schools is something of a subjective matter.

Mitchell never entered the transfer portal and, as he put it, only knew teams were interested because his follower count on X, formerly known as Twitter, increased with some notable names.

“Nobody really reached out to me,” he said. “I got some followers on Twitter, but I didn’t really indulge in it, so I couldn’t tell you.”

» READ MORE: Cornerback, safety or both? Cooper DeJean doesn’t care about labels. The new Eagle just wants to play.

There was interest, though. During ESPN’s draft telecast on Thursday night, former Alabama coach Nick Saban said Mitchell was the school’s No. 1 potential transfer target last year. Justin Wentworth, Mitchell’s high school coach at Willistown, said the Crimson Tide weren’t the only big program hoping to lure Mitchell away for his final collegiate season, either.

Unable to contact Mitchell directly, a few coaches reached out to Wentworth as a workaround but were rebuffed.

“This past summer was just crazy,” Wentworth told The Inquirer. “You have these relationships with these coaches and they’re bouncing around and, now that they’re able to pay through this NIL stuff, you get coaches calling like, ‘Can you get him to just get on the phone with us?’ ... There were quite a few SEC schools that wanted him to come. And the money that was going along with that? That in itself would have been a life-changing situation. But now, being the No. 22 pick, it all worked out.”

What was Wentworth’s reply when schools called him asking for help?

“If he ain’t answering your call and he ain’t getting in the portal, what do you want me to do?” Wentworth said. “I’m not going to twist his arm, that’s his choice.”

Mitchell’s choice was to stay. He was coming off a season in which he had 25 pass breakups and five interceptions, earning second-team All-American honors while starting all 14 of Toledo’s games. He made second-team All-American again last year with 19 pass breakups and one interception as well.

Candle said he wasn’t nervous about Mitchell being swayed by the offers to leave last summer, largely because he knew the cornerback wasn’t the one stirring up the interest in the first place.

“When you’re an All-American player as a young player, you’re going to get noticed by people,” Candle said. “There’s tampering all over college football now, it’s not a good thing for our game, but it is what it is.

“It speaks to the loyalty that he has for this place and the character that he has as a human being, and what drives him. Somebody probably told him at a young age that it’s never the wrong time to do the right thing and he did the right thing and ended up being a first-round draft pick because of it.”

Although Mitchell’s decision to stay with Toledo paid off, it did put the onus on him at the Senior Bowl in February to show how the 22-year-old would fare against a higher level of competition.

Mitchell also faced questions about his ability to hold up in press man coverage after playing mostly off the line of scrimmage in Toledo defensive coordinator Vince Kehres’ system. Lined up in press against a group of receivers that included first-round wideout Ricky Pearsall and third-round pick Roman Wilson, Mitchell improved his draft stock with a solid week of practices.

» READ MORE: Eagles draft takeaways: Trades and more trades, as the new-look defense and O-line take shape

“That really helped us see that he had a diverse array of skill sets there,” Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said. “That was one of the concerns when you see him play, that he’s only playing a certain way and he is allowing his eyes to lead him to the ball. So when he got in people’s face at the Senior Bowl, we thought he was one of the best players at the Senior Bowl against really good competition. ... That was important for us.”

Mitchell boosted his stock further at the combine, running a 4.33-second 40-yard dash at 6-foot, 195 pounds and jumping 38 inches, which was in the 74th percentile for his position.

As he watched Mitchell run the 40 at the combine, Wentworth said he thought about the back-to-back times he ran at a recruiting camp at the University of Florida years earlier.

“He went out there and ran a 4.37 [timed by a] laser,” Wentworth said. “The defensive backs coach from Florida put him back on the line and said, ‘Do it again.’ And then he ran 4.36.”

The common thread between the two events is a mantra Mitchell revealed during a video news conference on Thursday night.

“I feel like my whole life I’ve just been trying to demand respect,” Mitchell said. “Coming from a small town, coming from a small college, just wanted to demand respect, and I feel like I did that through my college career and through the pre-draft process.”