First Impressions in the NFL Draft May Cost McCants

Five reasons why Keith McCants is having a worse year thus far than you are:

1--The All-American linebacker from Alabama began 1990 a lock to be the NFL’s No. 1 draft choice and a certain millionaire. But now he is in free-fall and may return to Earth only a couple-of-hundred-thousand-aire.

2--His future employers aren’t wild about his choice of friends.

3--His muscles still make for great pictures; his knee does not.

4--He lost a step and found a few pounds.

5--He shrank.

And so, Keith McCants, apparently, is going to become the object lesson of this year’s NFL draft. How far he tumbles, if at all, won’t be known until next Sunday. But some league observers say if he gets past Tampa Bay, where his college coach, Ray Perkins, will wield the fourth pick, or the Chicago Bears, No. 6 and in need of a linebacker, it could be a long drop.

And keep in mind that the slide just from first to fourth could cost him between $2 million and $3 million over the life of a four-year contract.

McCants got off on the wrong foot by hiring an agent, Lance Luchnick, with a checkered past and a cloudier future. Luchnick, who admitted previously to paying college athletes and coaches in violation of NCAA rules, is even now the subject of a grand jury investigation to determine whether he violated an Alabama sports agent law that carries a maximum 10-year jail sentence.

Although he represents few football players, some of Luchnick’s basketball-playing clients have been known to hold out, a term that sends chills down the spine of image-conscious NFL owners.

Indeed, if truth be told (and few agents or league executives speak for the record on such matters), some of the more conservative owners would rather bargain across a table with William Kunstler than Lance Luchnick.

McCants’ second step didn’t go any better. When he deigned to hold a workout earlier this month for those teams fighting for the right to make him a millionaire, his performance wasn’t worth the ante.

He showed up overweight and did just nine repetitions in the 225-pound bench press, compared to the average of 17 done by those linebacking prospects who went through the NFL’s full scouting combine in February. His fastest time over 40 yards was 4.68 seconds in April; last year, he covered the same distance in 4.45.

Further, an X-ray revealed a knee injury no one even knew McCants had, and, most ignominiously perhaps, he was measured at 6-foot-2 1/2 inches, although throughout his playing days, the Crimson Tide media guide had him at 6-foot-5.

“It was a case,” San Diego Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard said, “where the real work and evaluation wasn’t done until after word came out that this superhuman football player was making himself available for the draft.

“Now, I still think he’s a terrific football player, and I don’t think anybody questions how good he was in college or how good he could be in the pros. But from the workout, you get the idea this kid is not coming into the NFL saying, ‘I’m doing everything I can to be worthy of the No. 1 pick.’

“Actually, it was almost the opposite, like he was doing us a favor. He was under-strength and out of condition. He hasn’t done the right things so far, and that scares people.

“And it makes them wonder,” Beathard continued: “ ‘What’s he going to do when he gets a few dollars in his pockets?’ ”

A fair question and one that, right about now, is making the rounds of draft rooms all around the league.

Because what is already known about McCants, one of almost three dozen underclassmen who renounced remaining college eligibility to take part in next weekend’s draft, is not nearly as intriguing as what has yet to be discovered.

“One phenomenon of draft day, and it happens every year, is what can be called the plummeting draft pick,” agent Leigh Steinberg said.

“In that scenario, a player generally projected to go at a certain spot is not taken there and then continues not to be taken because the clubs that select behind that club figure the first team must know something they didn’t . . . something detrimental in the player’s background they should have found out, but didn’t.

“And so based on unfounded rumor, perception, fear and the information vacuum that exists on draft day--even if there’s nothing to know about--a player’s value can fall precipitously,” Steinberg added. “Not unlike what happens during a stock market crash.”

Last year’s nose-dive was performed by Louis Oliver, the former Florida safety and current Miami Dolphin, and was brought into your living room live by ESPN. Although there was never so much as a hint of drugs being involved, when the Dolphins passed on Oliver in the first round and took running back Sammie Smith instead, that was the first question that popped into the interviewer’s otherwise-empty head.

And Oliver’s agent, Steve Zucker, is still scratching his head over that one.

“Louis was a National Merit scholar, clean as could be,” Zucker recalled. “The truth of the matter was that only two teams were interested, Miami and Denver. The Dolphins gambled, got him on the next round and looked like geniuses. Denver passed him and took Steve Atwater, which turned out to be hard to argue with.

“It made for great TV, kind of a ‘what’s wrong with him’ thing for the viewers to think about. But there was nothing to it,” he said. “We tried to check it out afterward with some NFL people, but we never really could track it down.”

To be fair, McCants is free of any taint of drugs, although published reports have said he could soon be the target of at least one paternity suit and possibly several--the kind of distractions and publicity that no team wants.

Attempts to reach McCants on Sunday at his home in Alabama were unsuccessful, and messages left on an answering machine in Luchnick’s San Antonio, Tex., office were not returned.

McCants, however, has talked at length about every aspect of his decision to turn pro and said he would go wherever--and whenever--he lands, with no regrets.

“It was time to leave and do something,” he said, “I’ve dreamed about since I was a little kid.”

Keith McCants is going to be a steal for some team some day, but because he squandered the down payment, the cost of the first lesson--that professional football is a business run by grown-ups who take it very seriously--is on him.