“It definitely feels great to always know I’ve got a home.”

Ontaria ‘Pokey’ Wilson long ago learned to deal with change in his football life, especially with so much of it out of his control.

After all, consider that during his days at Florida State played for three different head coaches and had six offensive coordinators and three receiver coaches with the Seminoles. He’s had two looks in the National Football League in 2023 with the Los Angeles Chargers and last year with the New York Jets and sandwiched around the stint in Gotham was where he had had the most success and most stability in his football career — with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

And that’s a big part of why he put his name on a new two-year contract extension with the club this week that will keep him in Winnipeg for the next few seasons. Wilson and the club agreed to renegotiate his rookie contract after he posted a 1,000-yard campaign and was named the club’s Most Outstanding Rookie in 2024 and then pulled in 21 passes for 382 yards and three TDs in six games after returning to the club from the Jets.

“With the year I had as a rookie and then a couple games when I came back last year, I felt like I was maybe worth a little bit more than the rookie contract I was on,” said Wilson in a chat with bluebombers.com from his offseason base in Ashburn, GA, today. “Winnipeg felt the same way about it, too.

“It definitely feels great to always know I’ve got a home, that I know where I’m going. It’s comfortable — you don’t to get comfortable as a player, but I know where I’m going to be next year and that’s important.”

Wilson’s camp experience with the Jets last summer didn’t result in landing an NFL deal, but the receiver the Blue Bombers got back was more polished and more confident upon his return. Critical for him now, he said, is to continue his transformation into one of the Canadian Football League’s most dangerous targets.

“Being with the Jets was a good experience, especially to play at that level, and with that the game started to become slower and more natural to me when I came back up north,” he said. “I feel like I’ve got more room to grow. I’m hard on myself. Even if I have a good game I always find something I could have done better out there. I always feel like I can bring more to the team, even if I’m already producing.

“I want to work on being consistent and to always be that guy they call on to make those big plays in the moments we need them the most.”

One of those big plays, albeit in a loss, came in Edmonton in October in one of the most incredible catches in Blue Bombers history — one that a CFL play of the year candidate — and which has been plastered all over social media for months.

HOW DID HE CATCH THAT#ForTheW pic.twitter.com/V8YQbHxLoV

— Winnipeg Blue Bombers (@Wpg_BlueBombers) October 12, 2025

“I’ve definitely watched it a few times,” he said with a chuckle. “I’ve been tagged in it and people have been posting it so many times. I don’t mind seeing it again and again.”

Wilson’s signing is an important one for the Blue Bombers as management works to chip away at a long list of free agents which includes offensive weapons like running back Brady Oliveira and receivers Nic Demski, Jerreth Sterns, Keric Wheatfall, Dalton Schoen, Gavin Cobb, Dillon Mitchell and Kody Case.

A dynamic deep threat who also consistently makes catches in traffic in the middle of the field, Wilson will be critical in the team’s quest to be a championship threat again after last year’s 10-8 season — the ninth straight double-digit win season — which was still viewed as a disappointment.

“With the tradition built in Winnipeg, it feels like it’s a ‘bad season’ whenever you don’t make it to the Cup,” said Wilson. “That’s the standard there. We didn’t make it to the Cup, so we see it as our season wasn’t the best.

“We want to get back to the top.”