Jermod McCoy slid to the fourth round of the draft before selected by the Raiders and now just four months later it sounds like McCoy might be the front runner to start.
The California Post’s Vinny Bonsignore discussed McCoy this week on the Raiders’ flagship radio station, and he believes a healthy McCoy will ultimately beat out Darien Porter to start at cornerback across from Eric Stokes.
“If he’s good to go, and by all accounts he is, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t win the starting job at cornerback,” Bonsignore said of McCoy on Raider Nation Radio’s Morning Tailgate on Tuesday.
“Training camp is going to be so important for Jermod McCoy. Let’s stay right there for one second. It’s been a long time since he actually played football. That is one thing to keep an eye on. Not so much in the health perspective but just shaking off the rust,” Bonsignore continued.
“It’s been a long time since he’s competed… Now, he’s going to be competing at the NFL level. So, it’ll be really interesting to watch his progress just getting reacclimated to playing football, to playing cornerback at a level where the Raiders need him to play from a rough standpoint, from all of that standpoint, just getting back out there and getting back into the flow of things.”
Limited information has been available on McCoy’s surgically repaired knee; however, reports since the draft have been optimistic concerning McCoy’s recovery.
Based on what has been reported, it seems like McCoy’s long-term health is what steered most teams away from him on the first two days of the draft. The Raiders traded up one pick in the fourth round to take McCoy and according to Bonsignore, there were other teams ready to pounce on the Tennessee cornerback in the fourth round.
“I’ve talked to a couple of general managers around the league who shared what their intel was on him, and by the way, he was not lasting very much longer in the fourth round. People were ready to pounce,” Bonsignore said on Raider Nation Radio’s JT the Brick Show in May.
“They took the red flag off of him by that point in the draft across the league. So the Raiders did a good job of beating everybody to the punch and the way it’s been explained to me is it’s not a ‘right now’ issue. It’s a potentially long-range issue, the longevity of it. And Todd Gurley was a name that was brought up. He had suffered that devastating knee injury at Georgia, but he was recovered from it, was fantastic for a period of time in the NFL.”
“But then the longevity issue came into play [for Gurley]. People are looking for all these signs about the knee. Is it good? Is he good to go? It’s not that. It’s the longevity issue.”
x: @raidersbeat