By Hunter Jones
Special to Tidesports
HOOVER — South Carolina senior wide receiver Bryan Edwards picked a different approach to announce forgoing the NFL Draft and return to South Carolina for his senior season.
It’s pretty common players announce their intention with a statement posted on social media. Instead, Edwards posted a scene from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street on Twitter with the caption, “Enjoy y’all Tuesday nights. You can stop asking me now.”
“It was kind of a spur of the moment thing with the video, I actually watched the movie like a week before so it was fresh in my mind and I was like ‘this’ll be a good way to do it,’ so I did it,” Edwards said Wednesday at SEC Media Days. “Just sitting down with my family and just deciding what was best for me, I felt like I had a lot left on the table at South Carolina that I could accomplish and I felt like coming back would definitely help my draft stock. Ultimately, my number one thing for coming back was just wanting to win a championship with my teammates.”
Originally, Edwards wasn’t sure about South Carolina. After the departure of head coach Steve Spurrier, Edwards backed off of his commitment to South Carolina. When head coach Will Muschamp was hired, one of the first players he visited to try and get them to stay with their commitment was Edwards.
“I flew to Conway (South Carolina) that night and met with Bryan, John and Michelle, his parents. I thought the meeting was going pretty well,” Muschamp said. “And through the middle of the meeting, I felt pretty good about things until his grand dad walked in and had a Clemson jacket on. He played at Clemson in the ’80s. We had to weather the storm on that one, but Bryan came to South Carolina and has had a really wonderful career.”
The Gamecocks return a strong receiving corp for 2019, a group Edwards said could be special.
“We can be whatever we want to be this year,” he said. “I feel like we have the talent to do whatever we want to do. We have bigger guys like Ortre Smith. We have smaller, stockier guys like Shi Smith. Josh Vann is a guy that is coming along very well. We have all the tools to be whatever we want to be this year.”
