The Shemar Stewart of Bengals takes an unprecedented step towards the return to Texas a Holdout in the middle of the contract
Every day passing, there is a little stronger than Shemar Stewart could somehow end up not playing for the Bengals of Cincinnati.
The choice of first round of Texas A&M is held due to specific linguistic requirements in its contractual negotiations which are not fulfilled.
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And now, CBS’s sports journalist, Bud Elliott, shared that Stewart is back in College Station, working with his former Texas A&M team. There is the idea that he could go back to school and enter the draft again next year.
“It may not yet be legal, but again, everything in the NCAA is subject to a dispute,” said Elliott. “I didn’t know you could do that. I knew you could do this in baseball … I don’t know why you could do it in baseball but not football. You probably have to go to court.”
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Mike Florio de Pro Football Talk also wrote about it earlier in the offseason. Florio, however, shared a specific passage from the collective negotiation agreement which essentially suggests that Stewart could return to school, but would always be considered a choice of recovery of Bengals after the season.
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Here is this Florio ventilation:
“This is something that we considered during the 2025 draft both as to the quarter-arre Sander Sanders and the quarter-Arrière Quinn Ewers-Stewart could try to return to the university for the coming season. Even if it would require a real or threatened legal battle against NCAA, the rule which prevents a player who was written but which did not sign an NFL contract.
“In a somewhat surprising way, the ABC envisages the possibility that a written player returns rather to the college. Here is the language, from article 6, section 6:” If a university football player who becomes eligible for the Recovery last season during which the player was eligible to participate in university football, and thereafter, the player will be treated and the club will have exclusive rights as if he had been drafted in this project ( assignee). »»
“In English, this means that, if Stewart returns to university football in 2025, he would be treated as a choice of repechage of Bengals in 2026. Which means that he would not be authorized to reintegrate the project next year.”
It would certainly be unprecedented by Stewart, and if it withdraws it, it could establish a new wild trend that would change university football and the draft of the NFL forever.
At this point, this may be what’s going on.
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