Friday Features: Florida Tech gridiron star dreams of degree, not NFL Draft
By Maurice Patton
With five Gulf South Conference products currently on
National Football League rosters, it’s not as if that’s an unattainable goal.
But for
Florida Tech’s
J.J. Sanders, the GSC’s reigning defensive player of the year, reality has begun to set in.
Despite a season during which he had 18 tackles for lost yardage and 6.5 sacks – leading the conference in the former and ranking second in the latter – Sanders knows the prospects of hearing his name during the NFL’s three-day draft in two weeks are all but nonexistent.
That’s why the 5-foot-10, 250-pounder’s focus is primarily on the days following the draft.
“Plan A is to get my degree. That’s what I’m working toward,” said Sanders, a business administration major who is set to graduate on May 7 – a week after the draft, which takes place April 28-30.
“I knew it was tough coming in. For my height and weight, the position I was playing, I’m not prototypical for the next level. You can’t play forever. My main goal is to graduate with my degree, (but) I want to be optimistic and see what happens.”
Optimistically, Sanders has retained an agent and has been training with an eye on maximizing whatever professional opportunities may present themselves – perhaps as an undrafted free agent in the NFL, but possibly elsewhere.
Realistically, he’s taking 18 hours this semester to ensure that he graduates.
“I’ve been balancing the two, between training and staying on track to graduate,” he said. “It’s been really tough. A lot of people don’t realize – the closer you get to graduating, the tougher the classes get. You’ve got papers, projects, finals. It gets pretty tough, but it’ll all be worth it in the end.”
That’s the sentiment Florida Tech coach
Steve Englehart has come to expect from Sanders over the three years he’s been in the program since transferring from Kent State, where he helped the Golden Flashes to an 11-3 season and a GoDaddy Bowl appearance as a redshirt freshman.
“He’s been a great young man on the field, off the field, in the classroom,” Englehart said. “He has taken care of business and done what he needs to do. He’ll walk across that stage with a degree in the next month. He’ll have that to look forward to for the rest of his career, whether that’s with football or without.”
And while Sanders was a productive Panther – racking up 232 total tackles in three seasons and earning all-GSC honors as a junior in addition to helping spearhead FIT’s 7-4 campaign last fall – his stature, simply put, makes the next level an uphill climb.
“When you look at the next level, professionally, size is a big issue, and length,” Englehart said. “The longer the guys are, they seem like they have the better shot.
“J.J. is a heck of a football player. He played defensive end, but we could have played him in all sorts of positions and he’d have been good. (Being) 5-10 at the next level is going to be tough at any position – defensive end, linebacker, wherever. But he has some aspirations, and he’s going to work toward that. Maybe he gets the chance to play in the arena league, the Canadian league, the European league. It’s important to him to get to extend his playing career another couple of years, and maybe he gets an opportunity to do that.”
Sanders participated in a pro day on March 31 to showcase his skills in front of NFL personnel.
“It went OK,” he said. “I felt like I did well in some of the agility drills, but I wanted to do better at some other things. That’s what I’m training for now, so hopefully I can improve as I go to some other workouts over the upcoming weeks.”
Keeping it real, though, Sanders isn’t set on being a couch potato the last three days of April.
“I’ve got very slim chances of getting drafted,” he said. “I probably won’t be watching.
“It’s more the next couple of days after the draft that I’m looking forward to right now.”
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