Eric Edholm -- Yahoo! Sports
Thirty of the 96 underclassmen (31 percent) who declared for the 2016 NFL draft were not selected. That number was up from the previous year, when 24 of 84 underclassmen (29 percent) went unpicked in 2015.
That certainly doesn’t mean those can’t go on to have prosperous NFL careers, but it makes it a bit harder. And there’s no option right now to go back to school — once you declare, your eligibility has run out.
Figuring out the best way to protect the players and give them the most accurate information about their draft stocks has been something that both college and NFL coaches have sought to refine in recent years. And Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, who watched two of his nine underclassmen who declared this year go undrafted, is advocating a system he thinks could help prevent more bad decisions from happening.
What Meyer thinks will help, per PFT, is a system similar to one that Alabama head coach (and former NFL head coach) Nick Saban has proposed in the past: an underclassmen combine type of event. But Meyer and Saban think that having some kind of event for rising juniors and third-year sophomores in the spring might help the process.
“It’s not a process that’s well done right now,” Meyer said Wednesday. “There’s a rule that says the NFL can’t look at juniors. Well, of course the NFL [scouts] are going to look at a junior, and they should look at a junior.”
But spring practices typically happen as NFL teams are deep in preparation for that year’s draft. Adding another event to general managers’ plates at that time of year might be a bit tricky. Would this be one central event like the traditional combine? That’s likely not feasible. So you’d have these underclassmen events all over the country? Right now, the details are not making much in the way of logistical sense.
“We’re going to try to get something where there’s a time those [scouts] can actually come in and they can work out the juniors. Because information is good,” Meyer said. “[The players] are getting their information somewhere, so why not get it from the experts — the scouts, the general managers, people who have the right information? They’re getting it from agents and they’re getting it from wannabes, and that’s not good information.”
Still, the idea is noble. And Arkansas coach Bret Bielema has gone even further: Let underclassmen declare, and if they’re undrafted, they should be able to come back to school. After all, offensive lineman Denver Kirkland applied and went undrafted and now faces cracking a deep roster of the Oakland Raiders in camp. You understand the logic to a degree.
Nice, so what’s the problem, you ask? Well that underclassmen number — 84 declaring in 2015, 96 in 2016 — almost certainly would rise again. With nothing to lose, why not declare? No harm, no foul. Except that those players would be missing spring practice in all likelihood and their respective teams would suffer from that.
Right now, the broad-stroke ideas sound good. Giving underclassmen the full picture seems important. Right now, some poor decisions based on bad advice are being made. But until we have a system where that information is weeded out and players can truly find out where they stand in the NFL’s eyes with a system that works for all parties, it sounds like we’re not close to this kind of event coming to fruition.
Thirty of the 96 underclassmen (31 percent) who declared for the 2016 NFL draft were not selected. That number was up from the previous year, when 24 of 84 underclassmen (29 percent) went unpicked in 2015.
That certainly doesn’t mean those can’t go on to have prosperous NFL careers, but it makes it a bit harder. And there’s no option right now to go back to school — once you declare, your eligibility has run out.
Figuring out the best way to protect the players and give them the most accurate information about their draft stocks has been something that both college and NFL coaches have sought to refine in recent years. And Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, who watched two of his nine underclassmen who declared this year go undrafted, is advocating a system he thinks could help prevent more bad decisions from happening.
What Meyer thinks will help, per PFT, is a system similar to one that Alabama head coach (and former NFL head coach) Nick Saban has proposed in the past: an underclassmen combine type of event. But Meyer and Saban think that having some kind of event for rising juniors and third-year sophomores in the spring might help the process.
“It’s not a process that’s well done right now,” Meyer said Wednesday. “There’s a rule that says the NFL can’t look at juniors. Well, of course the NFL [scouts] are going to look at a junior, and they should look at a junior.”
But spring practices typically happen as NFL teams are deep in preparation for that year’s draft. Adding another event to general managers’ plates at that time of year might be a bit tricky. Would this be one central event like the traditional combine? That’s likely not feasible. So you’d have these underclassmen events all over the country? Right now, the details are not making much in the way of logistical sense.
“We’re going to try to get something where there’s a time those [scouts] can actually come in and they can work out the juniors. Because information is good,” Meyer said. “[The players] are getting their information somewhere, so why not get it from the experts — the scouts, the general managers, people who have the right information? They’re getting it from agents and they’re getting it from wannabes, and that’s not good information.”
Still, the idea is noble. And Arkansas coach Bret Bielema has gone even further: Let underclassmen declare, and if they’re undrafted, they should be able to come back to school. After all, offensive lineman Denver Kirkland applied and went undrafted and now faces cracking a deep roster of the Oakland Raiders in camp. You understand the logic to a degree.
Nice, so what’s the problem, you ask? Well that underclassmen number — 84 declaring in 2015, 96 in 2016 — almost certainly would rise again. With nothing to lose, why not declare? No harm, no foul. Except that those players would be missing spring practice in all likelihood and their respective teams would suffer from that.
Right now, the broad-stroke ideas sound good. Giving underclassmen the full picture seems important. Right now, some poor decisions based on bad advice are being made. But until we have a system where that information is weeded out and players can truly find out where they stand in the NFL’s eyes with a system that works for all parties, it sounds like we’re not close to this kind of event coming to fruition.
