Georgia junior outside linebacker Leonard Floyd already has announced the TaxSlayer Bowl on Jan. 2 will be his final college football game.
Will it be the swan song for Penn State quarterback Christian Hackenberg as well?
The 6-foot-4, 228-pound Nittany Lions junior was ESPN analyst Todd McShay’s top pick for the 2016 NFL draft when he released an early projection back in May. That was before Hackenberg experienced an erratic 2015 regular season on a 7-5 team that will go to Jacksonville with three consecutive losses.
“Obviously he has the physical tools in terms of the size and the arm strength,” McShay said this past week on a conference call. “He’s shown a lot of toughness over the last couple of years with receivers that struggle to get open at times and protection that wasn’t always there. The hard part with Hackenberg is that toward the end of the 2013 season, everything looked the part, and you think he’s going to develop into an elite quarterback.
“Then they had a new coaching regime come in, and he clearly did not buy in to what they were selling and what they wanted to do. He showed frustration with that, which is not ideal. At the end of the day, when I’m studying his tape, you don’t want to see a freshman year being the best year that a player has.”
Hackenberg, who is from Palmyra, Va., threw for 2,955 yards with 20 touchdowns and completed 58.9 percent of his attempts as a true freshman in 2013. Penn State went 7-5 but was ineligible for a bowl because of NCAA sanctions stemming from the child sex scandal involving former Nittany Lions defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.
Bill O’Brien was Hackenberg’s coach in ’13 but left to become coach of the NFL’s Houston Texans. O’Brien was replaced by shining star James Franklin, who had guided Vanderbilt to consecutive nine-win seasons.
Hackenberg’s numbers have regressed under Franklin, as he completed 55.8 percent of his passes as a sophomore and is at 53.3 percent this year.
This season could not have started more disastrously for the touted talent. In a 27-10 loss to Temple, Hackenberg completed just 11 of 25 passes for 103 yards and was sacked a staggering 10 times.
Penn State is coming off a 55-16 loss to Michigan State in which Hackenberg had an interception returned for a touchdown.
Franklin fired his offensive coordinator after the debacle against the Spartans and recently hired Joe Moorhead, who plans to implement a spread attack. Hackenberg said Friday during a TaxSlayer Bowl news conference he was intrigued by Moorhead’s ideas but he has requested feedback from the NFL’s Draft Advisory Board.
“It’s obviously going to be a tool for that decision when the time comes,” Hackenberg told reporters.
Most NFL draft projections have Hackenberg going in the second round as the fourth quarterback taken behind Jared Goff of California, Connor Cook of Michigan State and Paxton Lynch of Memphis. McShay continues to drift further and further from his pegging of Hackenberg as the top overall pick, saying it’s now difficult to project him in the second round because of his struggles with accuracy.
“It’s a really tough decision he has,” McShay said. “Do you really want to go back and play another year with a coaching staff where things have not been ideal? Or do you want to go to the NFL knowing you’re going to get drafted a lot later than you expected after your first year?”
The best-case scenario for Hackenberg, should he elect to leave, could be O’Brien wanting to rekindle the success of 2013. Otherwise, according to McShay, it might be better for Hackenberg to return to Happy Valley to reverse a sliding college career.
“He’s just not ready,” McShay said. “You just look at the numbers and the statistics and the history of it. From 2006 to 2012, there were 10 underclassmen (quarterbacks) in that seven-year span drafted in the first round, and only three have had success in the league – Andrew Luck, Cam Newton and Matt Stafford. Some of the others were RGIII, Blaine Gabbert, Mark Sanchez, Josh Freeman, JaMarcus Russell and Vince Young, so you look at 30-percent odds versus going back and coming out your senior year, because those odds are closer to 55 or 60 percent of having success in the league.
“Six of the last eight quarterbacks to win Super Bowls were seniors – Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, Joe Flacco, Eli Manning, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees. Aaron Rodgers left early but was able to sit in Green Bay and mature, so the only real outlier was Ben Roethlisberger. If you study the history of it, everything tells you to go back to school.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.