With Indiana’s championship win over Miami on Monday night, the 2025-2026 college football season has officially come to a close. There’s still plenty more on the horizon, though. With the end of the college football season comes the start of the NFL Draft season as hundreds of collegiate hopefuls look to leap to the next level of football.
Tennessee Football has multiple players projected to go in the draft this spring, with a possibility of even having multiple first-rounders. Former UT cornerback Jermod McCoy is a near lock for a Top 32 pick, even despite his injury, but a growing case is being made for another defensive player from the Volunteers to climb up and into the first round.
In a post-championship mock draft from CBS Sports on Monday night, Josh Edwards has a pair of Tennessee players being selected in the first 20 picks of the draft. The first pick he has is McCoy, who is slated to go 10th overall to the Cincinnati Bengals.
“Jermod McCoy sat out the entire 2025 season, but his film resembled that of a top-10 overall pick in 2024,” Edwards writes. “If the medical check comes back clean, Cincinnati would be getting a great player at a position of need. Defense is once again expected to be a point of emphasis for a franchise that has struggled to identify defensive contributors in the draft.”
As Edwards and many others have pointed out through the declaration period, the only thing raising concerns with McCoy is his current health. Fortunately, we’ll find out more on where that stands through the draft process over the next few months. Otherwise, though, McCoy has all the traits of being the first cornerback taken off the board this spring. He was dominant as a teenager during the 2024 season and has had plenty of time to recover from his ACL tear in January 2025.
McCoy has typically landed in the 10-15 range of most pre-combine mock drafts.
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The other Tennessee projection that CBS Sports had is McCoy’s secondary teammate, Colton Hood. The former Colorado transfer had a breakout season with the Vols in 2025 and filled a much-needed No. 1 role with both McCoy and Rickey Gibson III sidelined for the entire season.
Edwards has Hood tagged at No. 20 to the Dallas Cowboys: “The cornerback position is inherently volatile unless the player is one of the league’s best. Neither Trevon Diggs nor DaRon Bland has been held in that regard. The lucrative contracts given to those two players aged poorly, and it remains a position of need. Colton Hood has been a fast riser this year.”
While going up against some of the SEC’s top No. 1 receivers last season, Hood posted 50 tackles, two touchdowns, one interception, one forced fumble, and one fumble recovery. When he does land a first-round projection, Hood has typically been picked as one of the last selections in the first round. This is probably one of the highest projections that we’ve seen for Hood so far. He’s typically landed around No. 28 to a second-round pick in many of the mock drafts that have been released so far.
The 2026 NFL Draft will take place from Thursday, Apr. 23, to Saturday, Apr. 25, in Pittsburgh. Stay tuned to Rocky Top Insider for more NFL Draft news as the college football season winds down and the draft season begins to heat up.
