This year’s NFL draft class speaks reluctantly about its COVID-19 experiences.
“It’s crazy,” Ohio State tackle Nick Petit-Frere said. “The season got canceled, came back, games got canceled. We played one of the most crazy seasons you could ever imagine in the history of college football and somehow, the Ohio State Buckeyes were in the championship game. ... This has been a once-in-a-lifetime two or three years."Strong faced a monumental obstacle when the Football Championship Division decided to play a spring and fall season in 2021.
At Louisiana, it was worse for tackle Max Mitchell, who spent two weeks in isolation after a COVID-19 test showed he had antibodies. He returned in October and finished the season, but the impact lingers. “First, no one wants that stick up your nose," Auburn linebacker Zakoby McClain said. “I got my vaccine so I didn’t have to go through it as much. It will be very stress-free because no one wants that stick up their nose.”
For a player such as Metchie, who was born in his mother’s native Taiwan, lived in Ghana until moving to Canada at age 6 and attended high schools in New Jersey and Maryland as the son of a Nigerian father before choosing Alabama, the easing of travel restrictions would be a welcome respite — especially as he works his way back from a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.