Once a college football player has decided he’ll enter the next year’s NFL draft, how much longer should he keep playing for free? That may be a question that Staford cornerback Paulson Adebo is asking himself right now.
Adebo is in his third year out of high school and will be eligible for the 2020 NFL draft, and he and Stanford already know that he’s going pro, even though he didn’t play at all as a freshman and therefore could maintain his NCAA eligibility long enough to stay at Stanford for both the 2020 and 2021 seasons if he wanted.
But Todd McShay said during the ESPN broadcast of Stanford’s game on Saturday night that Stanford coach David Shaw told him that Adebo, a likely high first-round pick, will definitely turn pro.
“I know there’s no chance we’re bringing him back,” Shaw told McShay.
Given that, Adebo ought to be thinking about just how much longer he’s going to play. A Stanford player, Christian McCaffrey, was among the first to set the trend of draft prospects sitting out bowl games, and it seems likely Adebo will do that this year. But what about stepping away even sooner? Last year Nick Bosa decided early in the college football season to leave Ohio State entirely after suffering an injury. Adebo is among the college players who should be thinking this year about whether to step away, even in the middle of the season.