Non American here but big sports fan and I hear about D1 athletes and people playing college sports and the NFL draft and was just wanting to know how they all tie in together.
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Former College Football player here. All three systems are separate. It is not at all like Europe where a soccer team will have an academy and train promising youngsters. Most kids simply attend the High School for their school district and try out for the team. If you make the team and play well or show potential, then college coaches will find out about you and start recruiting you to attend their college (assuming you are on track to meet that college’s academic requirements). Then you choose which college to go to. Those same colleges run camps in the summer to train high school players. This can generate a little money for their program and more importantly let them get a look at players they might be interested in. If you aren’t as talented or go unrecruited, you can still try and make the team in college after enrolling as a student. This is known as “walking on”. That’s what I did. If you play well or show potential in college, NFL coaches will hear about you. They will send scouts to your school to watch games and practices. They will also come to “Pro Day” where it’s more of a workout similar to the combine. If all this goes well you might get an invite to the Combine which is where top players are invited to an organized workout for all the teams to see. After this is the NFL Draft, where each team gets 7 picks and they get the player they choose with that pick. Everyone else is an undrafted free agent and some of them get invited to join an NFL team. NFL will start their preseason with around 90 dudes on the roster and cut to 53 before the first game of the regular season. So the odds are pretty bad for guys taken late in the draft and even worse for undrafted free agents.
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