I know everyone wants to blame Mullen for the horrible recruiting he did, but in seven rounds, 29 players came from G5 schools, while 13 of those 29 came from FCS schools. They can't ALL be busts. As much as it pains people to say, player development is the likely culprit. Granted, our team was VERY young, but we had many seniors. Only Piersall was worthy of the NFL draft?
I can't keep up with all the transfer players but Princely and Antwaun Powell Ryland will be drafted reasonably well next year.
I have the same question. Staffs and systems showcase potential, and we know the NFL drafts potential to some extent. Looking forward to seeing how Princely does at Ole Miss. Good for Antwaun if he's progressing and showing that he can play big time football.
As much as these NFL teams say they look at all players, perception is a thing. Players that come from winning teams, they will find more forgiving. Guys like Pearsall, that is on a sub-500 team, but still get drafted in the first round...that guy is lifting himself out with his bootstraps. He killed the combines. Good for you, Ricky.
"The peer comparisons show the answer to the series of questions above to be “both”. Mullen didn’t recruit well enough; Scott Stricklin said as much when he fired his two-time employee. Napier has not done as good a job as some of his peers at pulling immediate draft-quality players out of the transfer portal. On top of those, circumstances also led to some guys not declaring this year when they otherwise might have." I believe that this article was even handed and objective. Yes to saying 'both"; Yes to not pulling players out of the transfer portal. However, I believe the poor shape of the program before Napier, was not attracting these draft quality players. Yes to some of the players wanting to get one more year of college ball to improve their draft chances in 2025 draft.
Was his potential "missed" by the staff, did he have attitude issues that we know of, did he transfer to a system more suitable or is playing in a conference where he's just a man among boys? I'm sure in the back of our minds is the question, how did we let him get away?
From what I heard, he didn't play well with others. Kind of a selfish attitude. Let's see how he does at Ole Miss, because when he was focused, he was pretty disruptive.
My bad. Not sure why Antuan left. He picked up the slack pretty well when Cox was kicked out, then kind of went unnoticed.