We don’t often mention punters when we’re listing the players leaving college football early for the NFL draft, but we don’t often come across punters like LSU’s Brad Wing.
Although Wing hasn’t said anything about it publicly, Gannett Louisiana reports that Wing will declare for the NFL draft.
That’s no surprise. Wing has a strong leg, good hang time on his punts and good accuracy for dropping the ball inside the 20-yard line, so he’s certainly good enough to get NFL teams’ attention. And Wing has never made much of a secret that he left his home in Australia and moved to Louisiana to be an athlete, not a student, so he’s likely eager to move on. Wing has been suspended from LSU’s bowl game for violating team rules, which means his college football career is effectively over, even though he’s a third-year sophomore who still has two years of NCAA eligibility remaining.
In this year’s draft, two punters were selected: Jacksonville chose Bryan Anger in the third round, and Carolina chose Brad Nortman in the sixth round. The best guess is that Wing would seem likely to go somewhere lower than Anger but higher than Nortman in the 2013 draft.