As former LSU offensive tackle La’el Collins continues to see his draft stock tank while police seek to question him about the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Collins is now seeking to be pulled from the draft entirely.
Jay Glazer of FOX Sports reports that Collins’s agent is asking the NFL to take him out of the draft pool and instead put him in the supplemental draft. The NFL supplemental draft takes place each summer and gives players who had a change in their eligibility status (such as being declared ineligible by the NCAA) a second chance to get drafted by the NFL. There’s no precedent for the supplemental draft to be used because of legal issues swirling around a player. For that matter, there’s no precedent for anything like what’s happening with Collins right now.
Despite reports that Collins is not a suspect in the shooting of his ex-girlfriend, teams are privately saying they won’t draft him unless the police fully clear him. And given the length time a murder investigation can take, it seems awfully unlikely that Collins will be fully exonerated before the draft is over. It’s already a near-certainty that Collins won’t be drafted tonight, even though he was previously viewed as a first-round pick.
Ultimately, the NFL will decide whether Collins can be placed in the supplemental draft pool. If he is, he’ll have to wait until the summer to join an NFL team. If he’s not, he may not get drafted at all this week, and he’d then have to hope some team would consider signing him as an undrafted free agent.
Either way, Collins is currently facing an issue much more serious than football.