Draft day is usually a cause for celebration for pro football hopefuls, the culmination of years of hard work and the beginning of a potentially promising NFL career.
For Keith McCants, April 22, 1990, was all of those things, but is now also a reminder of what might have been. It was thirty years ago today that McCants went No. 4 in the NFL draft to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers following an All-America career at Alabama.
A 6-foot-3, 245-pound linebacker who was blessed with elite speed for his size (4.5 seconds in the 40-yard dash), the Mobile native entered the 1990 draft season as arguably the top prospect in all of football. But one calamity after another — many of them self-induced — left McCants three decades later not only largely unsuccessful in his sport, but a living, breathing cautionary tale.
Now 52, McCants has endured addiction, depression, homelessness, financial ruin and early-onset dementia since leaving the NFL in 1995 — and says he once attempted suicide. His is the classic story of “too much, too soon,” the proof that the path from high school and college stardom to NFL immortality is never a straight line.
“I’m extremely lucky to be alive — extremely,” McCants told AL.com. “The only thing I want to do now is take all my experiences — good and bad — and spread my story, make sure the next man doesn’t have the same problems and go through the same things that I went through. I want people to go down a better direction than I had to go down. All that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
McCants played only six seasons in the NFL with three different teams, and was out of the league before his 28th birthday. In 88 games as a pro (39 of them starts), he totaled 192 tackles and 13.5 sacks.
McCants blames injuries, including a bad right knee that he first hurt in high school, along with an involuntary switch to defensive end for his lackluster NFL career. And it’s fair to say that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of that era were not exactly known for their ability to develop young players.
“I don’t know if Keith had a mentor,” said Darron Patterson, who covered high school sports for the Mobile Press-Register from 1978-88. “Had he had a mentor who could have simplified things for him and kept him on the right path, he might have been a real success in the pros.”
McCants’ name is often mentioned among the great first-round busts in NFL draft history, in part because he was drafted between Cortez Kennedy and Junior Seau, both Hall-of-Famers. He also came from the same college program in the same era and played the same position as Derrick Thomas and Cornelius Bennett, one of whom is one of the league’s all-time greats, while the other started in five Super Bowls.
But McCants bristles when he’s associated with the “B” word.
“People who understand the game, people who watch film know I wasn’t a bust,” McCants said. “I got double-teamed a lot, and other people made all the plays. I switched positions. … (Longtime NFL coach) Buddy Ryan said it best ‘this young man played on one leg for six years. It was incredible.’”
McCants’ life since the NFL has been one misstep after another. He’s been divorced twice (he has four children between the ages of 21 and 27), and says he’s lost more than $17 million through a variety of bad investments. In 2012, he was featured in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “Broke,” in which he detailed the financial problems he’s endured since his NFL career ended.
McCants has been arrested a number of times on mostly drug-related charges, including as recently as June of 2018. He was homeless for more than two years, and old friends and acquaintances would often tell stories of running into him on the street in Mobile or other cities in Alabama.
Former Alabama and Tampa Bay head coach Ray Perkins, who originally recruited McCants for the Crimson Tide and drafted him with the Buccaneers, told AL.com this week he has not spoken with McCants in several years.
“I pray that he’s doing good,” Perkins said. “I hope so.”
Bill Curry, McCants’ coach during his Alabama career, said he’s also fallen out of touch with his former star player.
“At this stage of my life, the best thing that can happen to me is to hear from my old players,” Curry told AL.com in 2019. “That happens every day. But the worst thing is for one of my guys to have a hard time. And I’m really sorry to hear about how things have gone for Keith.”
McCants grew up just northwest of downtown Mobile in the Orange Grove housing project, once the largest such community in the state of Alabama, and among its most notorious. Like so many other young African-American men raised in similar environments, sports were his escape from life on the streets.
An oft-told tale is that McCants — whose neighborhood was in Blount High School’s district — wound up at Murphy High School after smashing a backboard during a summer league basketball game when he was in eighth grade. McCants said that a basketball coach told McCants’ mother, Cindy, he would overlook the cost of replacing the backboard if he would transfer to Murphy, which he did.
McCants had a phenomenal senior season at Murphy in 1986, totaling 130 tackles and three interceptions. After the season, he was named first-team all-state, USA Today second-team All-American and headed up the Alabama Sports Writers Association’s Super 12 list of the top recruits in the state.
Though originally a Tennessee fan because of former Murphy linebacker Charles Kimbrough (who played for the Volunteers in the early 1980s), McCants ultimately signed with Alabama alongside high school teammates Ben Holt and Sam Atkins, both offensive linemen.
“On the field, he was unstoppable,” Patterson said. “Keith, he was like ‘The Predator’ — speed, power and a bad attitude. Just all the tools. He was a man among boys. Sideline-to-sideline, cover, drop deep, intercepting passes and rushing the passer. He was really fun to watch.”
McCants’ Alabama career hit an early stumbling block when his grade in a freshman-level English course was invalidated by the NCAA eligibility center. Under the NCAA’s controversial “Prop 48” (which was later overturned), McCants lost a year of eligibility and could not even practice with the Crimson Tide in his freshman season of 1987.
While Thomas was setting still-standing SEC records of 27 sacks and 44 tackles for loss in 1988, McCants had an outstanding debut season in his own right. The sophomore totaled 78 tackles, seven tackles for loss, two forced fumbles and an interception.
“I think the thing that stood out about Keith was that he was a freak athlete,” said Roger Shultz, Alabama’s starting center from 1987-90. “Everybody uses that term, but he’s kind of one of the first guys that defined it. He was always one of the strongest guys on the team, and for how big he was, he was so fast.”
Thomas was a senior in 1988, and was off to the NFL after winning the Butkus Award as the country’s top linebacker. He was drafted No. 4 overall by the Kansas City Chiefs, where he was one of the league’s brightest stars before his career — and ultimately his life — was cut short by a car accident in early 2000.
With Thomas gone, the role of Alabama’s defensive leader went to McCants. He put together a breakout 1989 season, totaling 119 tackles — including 16 against Tennessee and 18 each against LSU and Auburn.
Kentucky coach Jerry Claiborne told The Sporting News that McCants “is one of the best players I have ever seen. … He looks like an elephant and he runs like a deer.”
“He just had an innate sense of how to play the game of football,” Patterson said. “That's a dangerous person out on the field, man. He was just intimidating. He’d hit people and people did not want to be hit by him anymore.”
Shultz concurred with that assessment, saying “Keith was a great athlete, a great player in college, but he was kind of a wildcard. I think (defensive coordinator) Don Lindsey let him line up and do whatever he wanted to do. He kind of free rein and maybe that created some bad habits. But it worked for him in college. He was a great college player.”
Ironically, the signature play of McCants’ college career came in a loss, the now legendary 30-20 loss to Auburn in the first Iron Bowl played at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Early in the third quarter, McCants temporarily prevented a touchdown by chasing down Auburn receiver Shayne Wasden from behind at the end of a 58-yard gain.
McCants said he remembers passing at least two Alabama defensive backs on the play before making a shoestring tackle on Wasden. The incredible individual effort McCants displayed in catching Wasden from behind became so ingrained in the story of McCants’ career that he led his autobiography “My Dark Side of the NFL” with a description of the play.
“He was like that all the time,” Curry told AL.com in 2019. “He was one of the great players they’ve ever had at Alabama.”
Alabama had been undefeated and ranked No. 2 nationally prior to the Auburn game, but finished 10-2 after losing to Miami in the Sugar Bowl. McCants struggled with a lingering knee injury in that game, and sat out much of the fourth quarter.
Under normal circumstances, McCants would have used his stellar 1989 season as a springboard to his senior year. But as the decade of the 1990s began, the football world was changing.
The NFL had long shied away from allowing non-college seniors to enter its draft without extenuating circumstances such as financial or academic hardship. Oklahoma State star Barry Sanders had turned pro after winning the Heisman Trophy in 1988, but the NFL allowed him into the draft because the Cowboys were hit with NCAA sanctions.
Sanders opened the floodgates. Rumors of an impending NFL rookie salary scale caused more than 40 juniors — including Florida running back Emmitt Smith, Illinois quarterback Jeff George and Arkansas running back Barry Foster, as well as McCants — to apply for early entry into the draft, citing no other reason that they felt they were ready for the NFL. (McCants probably would have qualified for a financial hardship waiver, given his father died while he was in high school.)
“I knew they were going to let it happen,” McCants said. “We had some inside information. I was the first one to make the announcement. I talked to Emmitt Smith and said ‘you announce first.’ He said, ‘no, you announce first.’ So I made that announcement that I was gone. I had to withdraw from school and all that. A lot of Alabama fans were really upset. But one reason I really left was because I had a bad knee. I was already hurt.”
Faced with the likelihood of lawsuits, the NFL acquiesced in late February and allowed juniors to enter the draft. Early projections had McCants going No. 1 overall to the Atlanta Falcons, who were coming off a 3-13 season.
As people often do when change is afoot, football fans, coaches and pundits cried foul. McCants said then and still says now he didn’t understand why anyone would want to prevent him or any other football star from earning a living.
“Football is a child’s sport, but you get paid extremely well to do it,” McCants said. “That became my profession and I had worked all my life to get there. And I’m right there. I was rated No. 1 in the country. Why wouldn’t you turn pro? It wasn’t as much about the money as it was about making it and playing in the National Football League. About 0.1 percent of people in college football make it in the NFL, and I was ranked No. 1 in the world. That was saying a whole lot.”
McCants met with representatives of the Falcons during Senior Bowl week in Mobile, and appeared ticketed to go No. 1 overall when the draft was held less than three months later. But as happens so often during the draft process, warts began to appear on the top prospect.
For one thing, the Falcons were apparently uncomfortable with McCants’ agent, Lance Luchnick, who had never represented an NFL player before and had been decertified by the NBA. One anonymous NFL general manager told The Sporting News that McCants’ choice of agent called his question into character.
McCants remains bitter about what he calls a “chop job” against him by veteran NFL writer Len Pasquarelli, then with the Atlanta Constitution. Pasquarelli and fellow Constitution staffer Mike Fish published a story on March 20, 1990, detailing alleged illegal payments to an unidentified member of McCants’ family by Luchnick, who also represented McCants’ cousin, NBA forward Willie Anderson.
Pasquarelli came to Mobile to interview McCants for the story, which McCants said he understood to be a positive feature. After the report was published, McCants said the Falcons were “spooked” and turned away from him as their top draft prospect. (For what it’s worth, Luchnick later paid a $5,000 fine for failing to register as an agent in the state of Alabama, as was required by law at the time.)
To make matters worse, McCants showed up out of shape and overweight for his workout for NFL teams in Tuscaloosa three weeks prior to the draft. He also checked in at a shade under 6-foot-3, more than two inches shorter than his listed 6-5.
Nevertheless, McCants “has the tools to be a great player,” Jets general manager Dick Steinberg told The Birmingham News in April 1990.
Another knock against McCants was the pre-existing injury to his right knee. He said he first suffered the injury in high school before aggravating it during his time at Alabama.
“They did a lot of digging,” McCants said of NFL scouts. “They looked at everything, any kind of surgery, they looked at it. I had a couple of surgeries while I was at Alabama. And then with the NFL, they just kind of turn you inside-out.”
The Falcons ultimately traded the No. 1 pick to the Indianapolis Colts, who targeted George, a rifle-armed Indiana native who had begun his college career at Purdue before transferring to Illinois. The New York Jets were set to pick second, followed by New England at No. 3 and Tampa Bay at No. 4.
The Jets coveted Penn State running back Blair Thomas, who had been MVP of the 1990 Senior Bowl. New England traded out of the No. 3 spot, with Seattle — which had held the No. 8 and No. 10 picks (the latter thanks to an earlier trade with Indianapolis) — sliding in.
Once draft day arrived April 22, George went No. 1 and Thomas No. 2. The Seahawks chose a defensive player at No. 3, but went with Miami lineman Cortez Kennedy instead of McCants.
Randy Mueller, then a young front-office staffer in Seattle, told AL.com that the Seahawks’ choice of Kennedy — who went on to a Hall-of-Fame career — over McCants was “nothing against Keith.”
“I remember a big kid that was physical, could have probably played any of the four linebacker positions for us at the time,” said Mueller, who went to be a general manager with the Seahawks, New Orleans Saints and Miami Dolphins and recently worked in the XFL. “We played a four-man front so he wasn't a great fit for us and that's probably why he didn't get more traction at our place, just based on fit. And I think we were kind of in love with Cortez. We just thought that Cortez was such a good fit for what we wanted to do.”
That brought up Tampa Bay, which was then in the midst of 14 consecutive losing seasons. Perkins was entering his fourth year as Buccaneers’ head coach, and both he and Buccaneers owner Hugh Culverhouse (also an Alabama graduate) were enamored with the player Perkins had originally recruited to Alabama.
Tampa Bay snatched up McCants with the No. 4 pick. Perkins had no reservations about the selection, and had passed on an opportunity to draft Seau, who went No. 5 to the San Diego Chargers.
“Keith had really great ability to play the linebacker spot,” Perkins told AL.com. “As far as height, speed, weight and everything else, I felt like he had everything that could possibly make him really good at the pro level.”
McCants watched the draft with family from his apartment in west Mobile, and was interviewed live on ESPN after being selected. Though he says now he was disappointed he didn’t go No. 1, he told the Mobile Press-Register at the time that getting drafted by the Buccaneers was a “dream come true.”
McCants flew to Tampa to negotiate his contract, and in an era where rookie holdouts were common, settled quickly for a $2.5 million signing bonus. Before he was due to report back to the Buccaneers for training camp, he returned to Alabama with a literal pile of money and joined some of his old friends in the media to dinner at Mobile’s upscale Riverview Plaza hotel.
“Keith was sitting at a table at the Riverview with some woman that he had brought with him from Tampa,” Patterson recalls. “(Fellow Press-Register sports writer) Wayne Rowe was there. I was there. Wayne Rowe’s wife was there. I was going to treat everybody. I left the table and I told everybody ‘y’all get what y’all want, I’ll be right back.’ I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket. I came back and there was a $200 bottle of Dom Perignon (champagne) sitting on the table, with the cork out. It was one of those corks that flared out when you took it out of the bottle. I’m like ‘who ordered this?’ I took a steak knife and I whittled the cork down to where I could get it back in the bottle and told them ‘come get this, because I’m not paying for it.’ … The fix was already in. Keith was going to pay for it. … Come to find out, Keith had an attaché case with him, and I swear to God, it had $500,000 in it, in cash. It was unreal.
“I told Keith ‘you can’t be walking around with this kind of money.’ But he was from Orange Grove projects, never really had anything. I’m sure they took care of him up at Alabama. But he’s like so many of these other kids, once they get a chance, they buy cars and jewelry. They just go overboard.”
(Shultz tells a similar story of McCants returning to Tuscaloosa around that same time and showing off “a damn briefcase full of 100-dollar bills” to his former teammates.)
McCants eventually made his way back to Tampa, but wasn’t able to work his way into the lineup as quickly as he and Perkins had hoped. His knee still hadn’t healed, and he was held out of much of the preseason.
McCants ultimately appeared in 15 games as a rookie in 1990, starting four. He totaled 44 tackles, with two sacks and one fumble recovery.
“I knew when we drafted him it was going to take some time,” Perkins told The Sporting News in September 1990. “You’re not talking about a finished product coming out of college. Is he ready to line up in a regular NFL game and start? No, he’s not.”
Perkins was fired after Week 13 in 1990, with the Buccaneers sitting at 5-8 that season and 19-41 in his three-plus years on the job. Asked this week about his dealings with McCants, Perkins seemed reluctant to go into much detail.
“When he got to our place, it just blew up,” Perkins said. “I don’t really know what happened … to him. But he had great ability to play the game. As far I know, he was a great kid. He just went down an alley that he shouldn’t have gone down. That’s about it. It’s a shame that that just has to be it.”
Assistant coach Richard Williamson finished out the 1990 season as Tampa Bay’s interim coach, and was elevated to permanent head coach the next year. His defensive coordinator, Floyd Peters, switched to a 4-3 alignment and moved McCants to defensive end.
McCants started 31 of 32 games the next two seasons for the Buccaneers, totaling five sacks in each. But he says he never got used to his new position, in part because of the knee injury that never healed properly.
McCants said he rushed back from surgery as a rookie, hoping to justify his signing bonus and status as a Top 5 pick. That’s when he began taking pain medication, which would ultimately lead him down a very dark road. He told The New York Times in 2015 he was ingesting more than 120 pills a week at the height of his addiction.
“I was just thinking about going out on the field and proving that I have should have been No. 1,” McCants said. “They would give you pills, put them in a bottle. I’d take them when I was in pain. The knee started having wear and tear on it. … One of the coaches made the comment that I would not be able to play after five years.”
Though McCants had signed a 5-year, $9.05-million deal as a rookie, only the first three seasons were guaranteed. In August 1993, the Buccaneers waived him rather than pay his $900,000 salary.
McCants quickly signed with New England, but was cut by the Patriots after just a week. He caught on with the Houston Oilers and appeared in 13 games as a back-up in 1993, then four more in 1994 before he was released by the Oilers as well.
McCants then landed in Arizona, where Ryan, the defensive coordinator in Houston during McCants’ first season with the Oilers, was head coach. McCants maintains a special affinity for the late Ryan, who he said once joked that McCants was his “third son” along with future NFL coaches Rob and Rex Ryan.
McCants appeared in eight games in 1994 with the Cardinals, with a 46-yard interception return for a touchdown against the Chicago Bears in December one of his career highlights. He played in all 16 games with the Cardinals in 1995, totaling 12 tackles and scoring another defensive touchdown on a fumble recovery against Seattle.
Ryan was let go after the 1995 season, and that ultimately spelled the end for McCants’ NFL career. McCants has been quoted in the past as saying he regrets ever having played football, but now insists he was mostly a victim of circumstance.
“What I regret is moving to defensive end and changing my position,” McCants said. “I wasn’t able to display my true talent, and the speed I had going sideline-to-sideline. That’s where I really was explosive at. They put me at defensive end and teams targeted me, because they always knew I was hurt.”
McCants now lives in an apartment in St. Petersburg, supporting himself largely with his NFL pension. When asked how he’s doing physically these days, he responded “not well at all.”
Among other things, he’s badly in need of a hip replacement. For many years, he has walked with the aid of a cane.
“It’s a struggle every day,” McCants said. “I’ve had 33 surgeries.”
Nevertheless, McCants’ life has taken a positive turn in recent months. He’s become close friends with Robert Blackmon, a successful south Florida real estate developer who is currently a St. Petersburg city councilman.
Blackmon helped McCants put together and market his autobiography, which he self-published in 2018. Blackmon’s friend Barry Edwards has devoted one hour each week (Fridays from 2-3 p.m. Eastern) of his daily political talk show on Tampa’s WWBA 820-AM radio into a sports program featuring McCants.
“It’s going pretty well,” said McCants, who has featured guests such as NFL greats Herschel Walker and Emmitt Smith and former Alabama stars such as Bennett and George Teague on the program. “It feels good talking to those guys, seeing how they view me, how I viewed them, getting a chance to open up. It’s been real nice.”
Creg Stephenson is a sports writer for AL.com. Follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.