With 24 NFL teams on hand, a group of six former Duke football players did their best to impress the scouts in attendance in hopes of receiving a phone call come May 8—the first day of the NFL Draft.
Headlined by cornerback Ross Cockrell, the Blue Devils took part in Pro Day Wednesday at Pascal Field House, running through a series of drills that will have major implications for their dreams of playing on Sundays next fall. Despite nearly half the football team filing in to support their teammates, the atmosphere was eerily quiet, with each move being scrutinized by the scouts in attendance. But head coach David Cutcliffe was confident in his players’ ability to thrive in the moment for which they had spent the past couple months preparing.
“It’s different, but I think it’s allowing them to focus,” Cutcliffe said of the quiet environment. “This isn’t playing football. This isn’t really [like] a team sport at this point. This is a lot more like standing over a putt and making a putt. This is an individual focus and I think they just kind of go inside themselves and zoom in to execute what they’ve got to do this day.”
Coming off a stellar performance at the NFL Combine, Cockrell was the Blue Devil with the highest draft stock entering Pro Day. Some were skeptical about the cornerback's decision to give the same drills another shot, as it seemed like he had reached his ceiling in Indianapolis.
But as he did at the Combine, Cockrell did nothing but further the case that he deserves to play at the next level by putting forth a 12-rep performance on the bench press and a 39-inch standing vertical, which were two reps and 2.5 inches higher than Cockrell's results in Indianapolis. After running the 40-yard dash in 4.56 seconds a month ago, Cockrell said his times in each of his two runs Wednesday were better than his Combine performances.
Cockrell said the opportunity to go out and perform with his teammates one last time was the main reason he decided to participate in Duke’s Pro Day.
“I just wanted to be out here with my teammates,” he said. “It’s my last go-around with some of these guys and I want to enjoy the day with them. I did have the opportunity to go to the Combine but that wasn’t with the guys I came in here with, the guys I did something special with, so I wanted to enjoy that.”
Although Cockrell has long been known for his leadership qualities and reputation as a great teammate off the field, it has been his physical form that has NFL scouts talking.
“What a lot of these guys are seeing over these two workouts is Ross’ poise and [that] he’s really, really smart and [has] great integrity,” Cutcliffe said. “The intangibles are incredible. What’s shocking them are the tangibles of Ross Cockrell. I think Ross is making a statement. He’s not just smart, he’s fast."
“I didn’t drop a single thing today,” Anunike said. “That’s one thing I said last night was, ‘Don’t drop nothing.’ Drop into coverage and just look natural at it, because I didn’t really do that too much in college. But I definitely worked on it because I heard a few guys talking about dropping me into coverage at the next level so I went ahead and prepared for that, and I think I did really well.”
Anunike—along with running back Juwan Thompson, defensive end Justin Foxx, wide receiver Brandon Braxton and former Duke quarterback Sean Schroeder—is one of many players around the NCAA that will enter the draft on the fringe of making it to the next level. A successful Pro Day performance is something that can go a long way in terms of boosting one’s draft stock. Despite being unsure of what the future holds, Anunike was confident in his performance and hopes to hear from an NFL team in the coming months.
“I think I did well today. I think I did everything I wanted to do,” Anunike said. “[I] came out here and performed, showed all the hard work I put in over these last 10 weeks or so and now it’s a waiting game. This is the first step towards the biggest career change of my life."
The Blue Devils will now wait to hear back from teams about individual workouts in the coming weeks. The players will hope to follow in the footsteps of former Blue Devil quarterback Sean Renfree, who broke Duke's eight-year NFL Draft drought when he was chosen in the seventh round of the 2013 draft by the Atlanta Falcons. With Pro Day behind them, it's just a matter of waiting until May.
Regardless of whether any of the players are drafted, Cutcliffe praised the group for their dedication as Blue Devils.
“You can look at all of them and tell they’ve worked," he said. "Not only since the end of the season, they’ve worked the entire time they’re here and they’re a representation of the program."
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