Otherwise no one would ever be drafted from the FBS schools, for example.
This article does a good job of explaining all the details, though
http://grantland.com/features/nfl-draft-michael-sam-gay-trades/
snip:
That argument aside, was there something ugly happening here? Did Sam’s stock slip so much after he came out of the closet that it suggests foul play? Again, it’s hard to say there’s definitive proof. Sam broke out in 2013 as “easily the biggest surprise in [the SEC].” For any player whose stock rose so dramatically in just one season of play, the pre-draft process is critical, and Sam’s performance between January and May was underwhelming. His performance at the Senior Bowl — two weeks before he came out — was regarded by scouts at the time as disappointing.
It’s reasonable to wonder whether the goalposts for Sam’s success were moved unfairly, as Will Leitch did last week, but the numbers suggest Sam performed poorly. Chase Stuart of Football Perspective put the combine work of each player into statistical context and found that Sam had the sixth-worst combine performance out of the 268 attendees in Indianapolis. He suffered a hamstring injury during his pro day, preventing him from performing at 100 percent in linebacker drills. It’s hardly out of the question to imagine that a player with a midround grade, a limited history of performance, and a dismal combine showing would see his stock fall to the point Sam’s did. Presupposing that Sam had a fourth-round grade before dropping to that of roughly a sixth-rounder, Nate Silver estimated last week that his chances of being drafted were about 50-50.
And yet, like most, I can’t help but feel like Sam would have been drafted higher had he not come out. I used as many quantitative sources that wouldn’t have been informed by Sam’s decision as I could in the above paragraphs to try to point out that this sort of drop happens to prospects, but it’s also unfair to suggest that teams viewed Sam as just another prospect. And I’m not talking about homophobia as the only factor. I spoke to one NFL team that suggested it was interested in drafting Sam and had no concerns about him fitting into its locker room or creating any distractions. The team was instead worried what the public perception would be if it drafted and then cut him — and this team had projected Sam as an extremely late pick, likely to be on its roster bubble — even if it made the move solely for football-related reasons. NFL teams are horribly, impossibly risk-averse, and while I’m sure some people in the league are homophobic, many more are simply just dinosaurs, moving toward any level of progressiveness at a glacial pace.
The idea that Sam would cause some sort of locker room issue was absurd from the moment he came out — his Missouri teammates had rallied around him ever since he’d told them about his sexuality last summer. The argument that his presence would inspire a distracting amount of media attention evaporated after Jason Collins signed with the Nets in February. Collins’s return to the team drew substantial attention that quickly dissipated; the Nets, 25-28 when Collins arrived, won 19 of their next 29 games to make the playoffs, where they beat the Raptors in seven games before running into the Heat. Sam’s career in St. Louis is likely going to go the same way. There will be a huge amount of media interest at first, and once people run out of ways to ask the same questions, the throng will disappear. Sam will get to work on his professional career in a state where he has enjoyed incredible success. Soon, he will be just another young football player trying to make a living at a difficult game. On Saturday, he was anything but.
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