Daily News | HBCU representation in the NFL draft has been dwindling, but how can the league reverse the trend?
Harold Carmichael was a wiry teenager hanging out at a teammate’s house when he decided he wanted to play football at Southern University.
“The call never came,” Carmichael said. “He said he’d get in contact with us and all that. My friend started getting letters and I said, ‘Maybe mine is displaced somewhere. Maybe they made a mistake.’” But even he has struggled in the last few years to get his players shots at landing on an NFL team either as a draft pick or an undrafted free agent.
“These guys have overcome a ton of adversity during their four or five years here,” said Willie Simmons, the coach at Florida A&M University. “They’ve gone without major resources, they’ve had to take long bus rides, and maybe didn’t have the summer training programs to get the conditioning, nutrition, and strength that athletes at other programs get.
For Pough, the biggest cause is the change in the recruiting landscape with Power 5 schools taking most of the top-tier recruits and Group of Five schools taking those who are left. Mac McCain III, an undrafted prospect out of North Carolina A&T, was signed to the Eagles’ practice squad multiple times last season and is with the team on a reserve/futures contract through the offseason.
The Virginia State defensive back’s last run through the three-cone drill elicited the biggest reaction from the cluster of scouts who’d made it to the HBCU combine. After he’d crossed the finishing line, the group stirred, comparing stopwatch times and smiling at one another. Moments like the one Adams had was the goal when Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy organized the combine. The exposure for the schools’ best athletes could make a difference in April.
If they’re going to catch on with a team, they’ll need a scout to go to bat for them, something that is easier to do if those scouts have interacted with them. “I was like, ‘Let’s do it, I want to be a part of the change,” he said. “I want to help the culture get back and bring HBCUs back to where it was.”
“You’re talking about the Deion effect,” Pough said. “I don’t know if we can replicate what Deion’s doing. He’s such a well-known commodity. Everybody knows the guy. Heck, I’m his fan. I was in awe, standing on the opposite sideline looking over there trying to see what Deion’s doing. “The climate that we’re facing right now has a lot to do with it,” he said. “The George Floyd case really, really brought a lot of the things that we, as African Americans in this country, have been facing. It kind of made everybody do a reset, to say, ‘Yes, we’ve come a long way, but we see we haven’t come far enough.’
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