Former MLB First-Rounder Joins SMU Football

Jordyn Adams is giving college football one of its strangest and most fascinating comeback stories.

The former five-star wide receiver recruit and 2018 MLB first-round pick has enrolled at SMU and plans to play wide receiver for Rhett Lashlee’s Mustangs this season, per multiple reports.

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That’s a sentence that sounds almost made up, but it’s real, and it immediately makes Adams one of the most intriguing names in college football.

Adams was once viewed as one of the best football prospects in America. In the 2018 recruiting class, he ranked as the No. 2 wide receiver, sitting in rare air near future NFL stars Amon-Ra St. Brown and Ja’Marr Chase.

He was also the No. 14 overall recruit nationally, ahead of a long list of players who went on to become major college and NFL names.

But Adams never played a snap at North Carolina, where he originally committed. Baseball pulled him away first.

The Los Angeles Angels selected Adams with the No. 17 overall pick in the 2018 MLB Draft, sending him into a seven-year professional baseball journey that never quite matched the draft-night buzz.

He spent most of his time in the minors, with brief major league stops with the Angels and Baltimore Orioles.

In 38 MLB games, Adams hit .165 with one home run and five RBIs before finishing with a minor league stint in the Milwaukee Brewers’ organization.

Now, at 26, he’s circling back to the sport that once made him a national recruiting prize.

The athletic upside is obvious.

At Green Hope High School in Cary, North Carolina, Adams was electric. As a senior, he posted 1,060 receiving yards while averaging 19.1 yards per catch.

That kind of explosive profile is exactly what makes this SMU move so fascinating. He’s older than a typical college player, but he also brings a professional athlete’s body, speed and maturity into a wide receiver room looking for playmakers.

There is one major wrinkle ... eligibility.

A proposed NCAA “Five-for-Five” model could complicate Adams’ return. The plan would give athletes five years of competition within a five-year window beginning after high school graduation or age 19.

If enacted in a way that impacts him, Adams’ college football path could get murky.

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For now, though, SMU has a headline-grabbing lottery ticket.

Monte Harrison made a similar baseball-to-football jump at Arkansas. Adams could be next. And if he still has anything close to that old five-star burst, the Mustangs just added a dangerous wild card.

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