Watching the NFL draft on Thursday night made me jealous.

Always a college football fan first and an NFL fan second, the last half-dozen or so years have soured me on college football and led me to realize the NFL has the best business model.

At least to capture the fans’ interest.

Thursday night, the NFL proved why its business model is better than college football. Worst team gets the best pick in a league where there is a salary cap. The entire organization benefits with interest spread somewhat equally among 32 teams with the top teams sacrificing. Imagine how good the transfer portal would be if the 130th FBS team (Kent State) got the first choice and everybody had a salary cap? Never will happen but expect college football to lose a lot of fans under this new system that benefits only the top 1 percent.

If college football had basically the same thing and, say, NEXT Thursday was the first day of the transfer portal, Temple would have essentially a lottery pick with the 10th one.

Imagine the kind of excitement around here if the Owls were getting one of the best players in FBS college football, with his NIL money being paid by a pool of TV money where all of the other 129 FBS teams contribute.

Won’t ever happen because the NFL sees the big picture and the colleges want the top 1 percent to hoard the riches.

A week ago, Temple was excited to bring in the top quarterback in Division II football but he canceled his scheduled visit to North Broad in order to sign with Ole Miss.

Now the Owls have apparently replaced him with The Real McCoy.

Or at least one of them in Gevani McCoy, who won the Jerry Rice Award as the best freshman in FCS college football a couple of years ago.

His skill set fits both what new head coach K.C. Keeler and his offensive coordinator (Tyler Walker) want to do at Temple, which is to spread the field with receivers and, if nothing is open, have an elusive running threat at QB who can move the sticks on his own.

That doesn’t mean Evan Simon can’t beat him out because he certainly can.

What it does mean is that we won’t see what we saw too often over the last six years. Temple looked like a high school team when Anthony Russo missed games in the Rod Carey Era or E.J. Warner missed games in the Stan Drayton Era.

We spent all last offseason pleading with Drayton to get a big-time quarterback in here, but Drayton was more interested in taking a two-week summer vacation in Houston than finding the Owls someone to pull the trigger.

Keeler is rolling up his sleeves and getting the job done.

This is college football and quarterbacks are going to go down and miss games here and there and a good program has an insurance policy. Until yesterday, there was no insurance policy for Simon going down.

Now Simon becomes McCoy’s policy and McCoy becomes Simon’s and maybe, in McCoy, the Owls have someone who can be the best quarterback in the AAC.

Monday: The Ground Game