MIAMI GARDENS — Draft mentalities are always interesting to me, especially among Day 3 draftees. Yes, the players are all appreciative that they were selected.
“To have my name be called is a dream come true,” said Miami Dolphins edge rusher Max Llewellyn, the seventh-round pick from Iowa, “and to have that be called in front of my entire family was really special.”
Still, it was Day 3 of the draft, not Day 2 or Day 1. These are highly competitive guys who, for the most part, don’t like being considered, well, second-class citizens, in a sense.
Consequently, reactions to being selected on Day 3 range from anger to feeling blessed to being humbled to being motivated to be better.
“As of right now, I definitely feel more humbled about my experience, especially getting drafted in the sixth round just because it was something that I never really imagined myself doing,” said Dolphins guard DJ Campbell, the sixth-round pick from Texas who was a five-star college prospect.
“Coming from high school and then transitioning to college I always wanted to be a first-round pick. One of the reasons I came back last year was to really improve my draft stock.”
On the other hand, Dolphins safety Michael Taaffe, the fifth-round pick from Texas, and Campbell’s college teammate, was greatly honored to be a Day 3 draftee. He wasn’t highly-regarded during his junior varsity career, wasn’t highly-recruited out of high school, and was originally a walk-on with the Longhorns.
“It’s my first time somebody’s really picked up the phone and said, ‘Michael, we want you,’ ” said Taaffe, who earned All America honors last season. “And so that means a lot. I owe a lot to these coaches that they believe in me.”
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For some, a Day 3 NFL draft selection lights a competitive fuse, so to speak. They feel overlooked, slighted.
“Obviously, I think I have a very, very high standard for myself,” he said. “So for other people to maybe not see myself in the way that I do, that definitely makes me a little hungry.
“So I’m going to come in there and I’m going to show these people that I’m a really good football player.”
That’s what one of the Dolphins’ draftees boldly declared a couple of years ago in colorful fashion.
You might recall Tampa Bay edge rusher Mo Kamara, the Dolphins’ 2024 fifth-round pick from Colorado State, vowing retribution against the entire NFL after saying that he was “very, very angry” about being lasting until the fifth round.
“I have a chip on my shoulder, so it just got even greater,” the affable Kamara vowed to the local media. “So everybody else, all 31 other teams, look out because the way I’m about to play against these guys, you should’ve picked me before.”
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