Oklahoma State football: Top 3 prospects for 2021 NFL Draft
By John Scimeca
As the dust settles from April’s NFL draft, it’s time to take a look ahead the Oklahoma State football stars who should go high in 2021.
Oklahoma State’s football program received an uppercut to the chin in last month’s NFL draft, seeing no players drafted for the first time since 2008. It breaks an 11-year streak in which NFL teams have drafted 21 Cowboy players, including the likes of Russell Okung, Emmanuel Ogbah and James Washington.
You can look at the this spring’s dearth of drafted OSU players two ways. To be pessimistic, does a signal the declining talent level of a program that has lost 11 games in the past two seasons? The last time a Cowboy wasn’t drafted, in 2008, the team was coming off the first three years of Mike Gundy in charge. The Pokes accumulated a paltry 18-19 record, finishing below .500 combined for these three seasons.
On the flip side, however, it could simply mean that several NFL-bound underclassmen decided to stick around in Stillwater to put together a special fall for the Cowboys. It was a disappointing finish by OSU in 2019, but perhaps some of its star players didn’t want to end their college careers with a loss to Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl.
Here are OSU’s top three prospects for the 2021 NFL Draft.