KNOXVILLE – College football players have been leaving a season or two early to enter the NFL draft for years.
Now players are skipping their team’s bowl games to focus on their futures.
LSU running back Leonard Fournette and Stanford all-purpose star Christian McCaffrey, two projected first-round picks, recently announced their respective decisions, and those choices became talking points nationally this week when McCaffrey made his choice not to play in the Sun Bowl and “begin my draft prep immediately.”
Tennessee has a couple of juniors who likely will go pro after the Volunteers face Nebraska in the Music City Bowl: running back Alvin Kamara and All-American defensive end Derek Barnett, who’s also a projected first-round pick.
“I think there’s a lot of extenuating circumstances that we don’t know about,” Vols coach Butch Jones said following Tuesday’s practice when asked about Fournette and McCaffrey.