For decades, the best college football players left school after three years, as soon as the NFL would take them. That\u2019s changing. Ravens General Manager Eric DeCosta doesn\u2019t see it as a good thing.<\/p>\n
The NCAA now allows players to make money off lucrative name, image and likeness deals, and the NCAA has also become more lax about granting players extra years of eligibility. That means players are waiting to turn pro, and DeCosta says he sees more older players who have less room for growth in the NFL.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a changing dynamic we\u2019ve seen with the draft,\u201d DeCosta said. \u201cPlayers are older. The average age of the players is not necessarily older but there are older players in the draft. We\u2019re seeing more 24 and 25-year-old players. That\u2019s because of covid initially, and now because of NIL, guys are getting paid to stay in. That\u2019s problematic for us because if guys are coming in older they\u2019ve probably got less upside. They\u2019re not three-contract players in some cases, they\u2019re two-contract players. And in some cases they\u2019ve got more injuries. They\u2019ve been playing college football longer so they\u2019ve taken on more injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n
DeCosta, who has been with the Ravens for 30 years, says the team has more players who will turn 25 as rookies than ever before.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to get a handle on that,\u201d DeCosta said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough for us to assess what that means. It\u2019s something we\u2019ve seen over the last three years, this will be the third year, 2024, 2025 and 2026. We might have had 4 percent of our players on the draft board 24 1\/2 or older prior to 2024, now that number is up to 18 percent. So we\u2019ve seen a 14 percent increase in older players on the draft board. That\u2019s something that we don\u2019t really understand fully what that means. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good thing, certainly. Historically we\u2019ve tried to draft younger players when we can. That\u2019s something we feel strongly. But now we\u2019ve got 18 percent of the draft board that\u2019s over 24 years old. So that\u2019s going to change the way we target players.\u201d<\/p>\n
College football players are now professionals, making money and choosing their own career paths in a way they never had before. It\u2019s a changing landscape in college football, and that changes the NFL as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For decades, the best college football players left school after three years, as soon as the NFL would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-591573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-nfl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}