While players were making their professional decisions, we had a series of conversations off-line re: what to do about Deionte Thompson. He is a mid-/late-first round talent, to be sure. And ordinarily you encourage those guys to get the paper. But his situation comes with two caveats, though. The first is that his play slipped in the last few weeks of the season: he didn’t exactly enter the deadline date with a stellar track record against OU and Clemson. The second was Thompson’s aggravated assault charge.
I maintained that he could make a lot more money by staying at Alabama for his senior season, where he would be a Top 10 pick — definitely the first safety off the board — in 2020.