The 2024 NFL Draft is the first draft for players in the 2021 recruiting class. Their senior seasons of high school football were either seriously impacted or canceled in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them were never able to visit the college school of their choice during the recruiting process until they enrolled during the summer of 2021.
Several of the top recruits in the 2021 class will hear Roger Goodell call their names during the first round Thursday night. More will come off the board Friday and Saturday. Most will return to college classes Monday, several at different schools from where they signed.
So tells the curious tale of the class of 2021.
In the hours after the United States began its shutdown on the heels of the spreading coronavirus, the NCAA on March 13, 2020 tweeted a ban on in-person recruiting. Speaking strictly in sports, a pandemic that wiped out nearly everything in its path in 2020 had an impact on recruiting and roster construction that is still being felt across college football.
“Recruiting the 2021 class was unlike anything else,” said an assistant coach who was at a Power Five school in 2020. “Most of it was purely off of film. Being able to see body types, growth potential and get accurate and recent movement information was damn near impossible. We had to rely a ton on evaluations from people that were not in the building. It was so much harder to find ‘sleepers,’ and a lot of guys were overvalued because of the inability to actually see their development in a normal evaluation period.”
Player rankings from 2021 Class
The two players who finished the cycle ranked Nos. 1-2, Quinn Ewers and J.T. Tuimoloau, each returned to college for the 2024 season, smartly pushing back their draft potentials for a year; they’ll be projected as first-round picks next April but probably would not have reached those heights Thursday night.
Ewers reclassified from the 2022 class. His journey is well-documented. Tuimoloau announced for Ohio State less than a month before practice started, on July 4, 2021 — months after his classmates made their February decisions. He’ll enter his third year as a starter for the Buckeyes.
One July 4 earlier, with the country on lockdown, Caleb Williams announced he was headed to play for Oklahoma. A fireworks show followed his commitment, which was televised live on CBSSports HQ.
Williams would be…
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