Do-it-all superstar Travis Hunter knows he’s at the mercy of the NFL’s sorting hat. But he’s not completely powerless when it comes to the question of whether he’ll get his wish to be the NFL’s first true full-time, two-way player in decades.
If the team that drafts him won’t let him play offense and defense, he can choose to not play at all.
And so, if it comes down to playing only offense or only defense, what will it be?
“It’s never playing football again,” Hunter recently told Garrett Podell of CBS Sports. “Because I’ve been doing it my whole life, and I love being on the football field. I feel like I could dominate on each side of the ball, so I really enjoy doing it.”
On the surface, it feels like idle chatter. A threat on which he’d never deliver. Why walk away from an NFL career over something like that? Why not just refuse to play for a team that won’t promise to let him play football the way he wants to play football?
That’s the better play. That’s the one that will give him some assurance that he’ll be able to be both a receiver and a cornerback at the next level.
But Hunter surely realizes the power of the sorting hat. Everyone loves the draft. Everyone wants to see destinies unfold in prime time. Even if specific players inevitably end up experiencing a fate worse than football death via the play-here-or-nowhere mandate that comes from one specific team holding his contractual rights for up to five years (and up to two more years after that, thanks to the franchise tag).
Plenty of busts become busts not because of the player’s inability to adjust to the NFL but because of where the sorting hat sends them. Look at how long it took Geno Smith, Baker Mayfield, and Sam Darnold (to name a few) to flourish. Were their initial struggles their fault, or was it the coaching, the supporting cast, the front office, the owner of the team that drafted him?
Hunter has leverage. If he means what he says, he should make that clear to the teams at the top of the draft. If you’re not ready to let me play both ways, don’t take me. Trade the pick to someone who will.
That’s the implication of his comment. And it would be far better for Hunter to make a power play before he’s selected than to tell the team that drafts him he won’t play offense or defense until he can play both.
He should do it. Plenty of fans who treat the draft like the offseason Super Bowl it most definitely isn’t wouldn’t like it. Plenty of people in the media would chastise him for defying the wishes of the sacred sorting hat.
So what if they do? It’s his career. It’s his prerogative. He’s clearly good enough to play both ways. If he’s truly thinking about not playing at all if he can’t play receiver and cornerback, Hunter should spend the next nine days making sure the teams that are in position to bring him to town are willing to embrace the fact that he has the ability — and the apparently strong desire — to pencil him in at the top of the depth chart at both of the positions he plays.
