Jalen Huskey is part of a local class that will almost certainly go through this month’s NFL draft without hearing its name called in the first three rounds. That would extend a sharp drop for players who went to high school and college in the District of Columbia, Maryland or Virginia, a group that produced 20 such picks in the aughts but only two since the start of the 2020s.
This year’s class includes Mansoor Delane, who will be announced as a cornerback from LSU, and Elijah Sarratt, who will be announced as a receiver from Indiana. They represent a region that once sent a steady stream of top-end talent to the draft and now appears headed for a shutout in the early rounds.
The numbers help explain why the dry spell matters. In the 2020s so far, only two players from the DMV who stayed in the area for both high school and college have been drafted in the first three rounds, a steep fall from the 20 in the aughts. For coaches and players across the region, that gap has fed a familiar frustration: too many prospects feel they must leave home to reach their ceiling.
Maryland looks like the strongest bet to change that pattern. The school recently signed five-star edge rusher Zion Elee, the highest-ranked recruit in program history, even as the Terrapins come off back-to-back 4-8 seasons and Mike Locksley is 36-44 since returning for the 2019 season. Maryland has also put $14 million of its $20.5 million revenue-share pot into football, according to 247Sports, a sign of how hard it is trying to stay relevant in a sport where money increasingly decides who can keep up.
Ricky Goings said that schools such as Maryland, Virginia and Virginia Tech have to remain on the right side of major college sports stratification if they want the big-money spigot to keep flowing. “The amount of money these schools would need to compete at the top of the Big Ten and the ACC [Atlantic Coast Conference] — I don’t know if they’ll continually have it,” he said. “But what they can do is two things: Use the dollars that they have efficiently and try to identify players who don’t get an opportunity at those bigger schools to come develop with them. That’s their path, to me.”
That is the tension behind the region’s draft slide. The DMV still produces talent, but the pipeline no longer behaves like it once did, and this month’s draft is likely to underline that reality again. If Maryland can turn Elee and the next wave of local prospects into stay-at-home success stories, it would do more than end a drought. It would give the region a reason to believe the old path can still work.
