SENIOR BOWL STEPPING UP? If there's no college football season this fall, it's going to make it extremely hard for NFL scouts to evaluate this year's crop of draft-eligible players, given that they'll be no games to attend and no new film to watch.
If that happens, the Senior Bowl might have a plan to help with that process.
Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy told Yahoo Sports he’s open to having a Senior Bowl buildup that lasts up to two-and-a-half weeks if there’s no college football this season. That would both help players acclimate to playing after extended time off and give the NFL personnel a bigger window to both evaluate the prospects as players and people.
The lack of campus visits would likely mean canned information given to scouts over Zoom, as opposed to more candid in-person conversations. Nagy said he’s also considered going to the NFL and asking that all players who’ve declared for the draft – not just seniors or graduated juniors – be eligible for the Senior Bowl.
Nagy, a former NFL scout, was more conservative about the numbers of players who would opt out of the college season.
“There’s only a small handful for guys who can rest on their junior tape,” he said. "It would be a small, small handful. The scary part for me is where are the kids getting the information, that’s the hardest part of the whole process, getting credible information.”
That last bit is what I keep going back to – nobody is particularly stoked about this situation. Pretty much everybody involved would much, much prefer to play the season as close to normal as possible. So I'm not giving up hope, because too many people are fighting too hard to try to make a season work.