A.J. McCarron is one of the top quarterbacks left on the draft board heading into the fourth round and his approach to interviews with teams over the last couple of months may have something to do with that.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that McCarron, who quarterbacked Alabama to a pair of national titles, rubbed teams “the wrong way” when he met with them heading into the draft. It’s not the first time that we’ve heard things along these lines about McCarron.
PFT reported that McCarron’s repeated claims that he’d been told by teams that he would be a first-round pick didn’t sit well with some talent evaluators around the league. McCarron said last month that he expected to go as high as the 16th pick and no lower than the 35th pick, but his analysis was way off unless the whole thing was an elaborate deception to assure he wound up with a particular team in the fourth round.
That’s not what the whole thing was, of course. If McCarron’s interviews and demeanor are keeping him from getting picked, he really did himself a disservice during the process because he’s a third-day pick based on talent. His biggest selling points are the intangibles associated with leading a team to multiple titles but McCarron may have rendered them moot.