Mizzou’s Drew Lock may ignore recommendation of NFL draft advisory board

The NFL draft advisory board told Drew Lock to go back to school for his senior year, but the Missouri quarterback from Lee’s Summit said he’s still considering going pro after the Tigers play in Wednesday’s Texas Bowl.

The board, which tends to be conservative, only gives players three grades: first round, second round or return to school.

Lock, a junior, leads the country in touchdown passes this season with 43, which has made him a candidate to leave college early, even though the upcoming NFL draft is supposed to have a deep quarterback class.

“I’m actually still considering it, due to things I have heard otherwise,” Lock said of entering the upcoming NFL draft.

Lock said he doesn’t have a “set in stone” timeline but would like to see who Missouri hires to replace Josh Heupel as offensive coordinator. Heupel left MU to become head coach at Central Florida.

“We are a very good team right now,” Lock said. “We’re not losing much. Those are all positive aspects that would then lead me to come back. That’s why I’m, again, waiting to make a decision, to see who we possibly could get for an offensive coordinator.

“What could I necessarily squeeze out of him? What could I learn from him, rather than jumping ahead, possibly missing the opportunity to learn from a great mind that may have been in the NFL, may have coached really good NFL quarterbacks?”

Jedd Fisch, the interim head coach at UCLA, visited one of Missouri’s bowl practices in Columbia. He is a candidate to replace Heupel.

Fisch runs a pro-style offense, and he was the Jacksonville Jaguars’ offensive coordinator from 2013-2014. He also worked with the Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos, Houston Texans and Baltimore Ravens.

Lock said the draft advisory board’s assessment told him he needed to show he could complete more intermediate throws, which Mizzou’s current offense — an up-tempo hybrid of the air raid and spread — doesn’t feature much.

“It truly had to do with what kind of offense we were running,” Lock said. “... We throw deep most of the time. It was just things that necessarily I couldn’t show on film.”

Lock, in his third year as a starter, has thrown for 3,695 yards and completed a career high 58.2 percent of his passes this season.

This story was originally published December 26, 2017 at 1:33 PM with the headline "Mizzou’s Drew Lock may ignore recommendation of NFL draft advisory board."