The obvious answer as to why receiver Marvin Harrison, Jr. skipped his Friday media availability at the Scouting Combine is this: Because he can.
He doesn’t need to talk to reporters at the Combine. It’s not required. Nothing at the Combine is required. Some have suggested the NFL should mandate full cooperation as part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The only problem with this argument is that players who have yet to be drafted aren’t members of the union.
It’s all voluntary. And Harrison chose not to volunteer to talk to reporters.
That’s his prerogative. On the surface, it should be no real surprise that the son of the Hall of Fame receiver who never chose to speak would choose not to speak. At a deeper level, it’s hard not to wonder whether there was a strategic reason for not fielding questions from the assembled media.
For starters, some of the questions are getting stupid. As in Opening Night at the Super Bowl stupid. More importantly, and in a year that has had many wondering whether quarterback Caleb Williams might make a power play, could Harrison be contemplating the possibility of trying to get to a specific team — and/or to avoid one or more other teams?
Harrison, like Williams, hasn’t hired an agent. In this Wild West age of college football, which has rendered the NCAA toothless, it’s fair to wonder whether a player with remaining eligibility to play college football could decide to return to college football if he doesn’t like where he was picked. (We posed this specific question more than a week ago; we have not yet received a response.)
We’re learning one court case at a time that multiple NCAA rules violate antitrust laws. Why should a player lose eligibility to play college football simply by exploring the question of whether to take a job in the NFL? If a college football player explored the possibility of taking any other job and ultimately decided not to do it, he’d be able to keep playing.
With or without an agent, any college player who has not yet signed an NFL contract and who has remaining college eligibility should be allowed to play college football.
Maybe Harrison is thinking about trying to do that, if he doesn’t like where he’s picked. He could return to Ohio State and make millions of NIL dollars. Or he could try to transfer to another school, going to the highest bidder for a year.
Regardless, we don’t know why Harrison didn’t talk. We do know this. By not talking, he avoided getting any questions about whether he has fully and completely submitted to the process of playing pro football — with no potential strategy lurking to return to college football, if he decides he wasn’t picked high enough or by a team he doesn’t want to play for.
