It has become a fairly common trend in recent years for top NFL draft prospects to opt out of their team’s bowl games to avoid injury that potentially damage their draft stock.
You are not going to see that from Alabama’s top two draft prospects in quarterback Bryce Young and edge rush Will Anderson. Both players have decided to play in the Crimson Tide’s Sugar Bowl appearance against Kansas State on Dec. 31.
They explained the reasoning for playing this week, and it all comes back to wanting to finish strong with their teammates.
Here is Young talking about his decision.
Anderson shared a similar sentiment, via ESPN:
“Everybody says it’s like the business part of it,” Anderson said of opting out. “But when you love the game of football, you also have that competitor part of it. And me just being at home and training and sitting down watching the game, I would be feeling so bad or not feeling great about myself — like that’s just the competitor in me.”
It never used to be a question whether or not players would play in bowl games, but over the past five or six years there has been a wave of prospects opting out of those games, and it has created quite a debate among college football fans and media.
But after seeing what happened to top draft picks like Jaylon Smith and Jake Butt in recent years, several players have not felt the risk of the non-playoff bowl games to be worth the risk.
It can be a very complicated discussion.
The addition of the college playoff, as well as the growing number of bowl games, have taken some of the luster off of the non-playoff games. They are largely viewed as exhibitions rather than something meaningful. For players that have the potential of an NFL career and millions of dollars ahead of them, they can also be seen as an unnecessary risk, especially since most people will not really remember who won the non-playoff bowls, let alone the smaller bowls.
But there is also something to be said for being there for your team and teammates. As good as Alabama’s football program is, the overwhelming majority of the players on that roster will not play a down of football after college. That is true for every other program in the country. For a lot of them, the Sugar Bowl (or a similar bowl game) could be their biggest achievement on the football field.
In the end, it still comes down to a personal choice and what that individual player values, and how much risk they want to assume.
Especially since there does not seem to be much concern from NFL teams over players’ decisions.
Players like Young and Anderson opting to play in the game might earn them some high praise from NFL scouts and executives for their willingness to put the team ahead of their own personal goals, but how many of those same scouts and executives would pass on Young or Anderson with the chance to draft them if they sat out the game? Probably none of them.
