Tearful Jabrill Peppers: Didn't want to hurt U-M; no draft decision
Emotional star said he wasn't protecting himself or his draft stock, felt he could have played if game was Saturday
His left leg hurt, the hamstring injury that kept him out of Friday's 33-32 Orange Bowl loss to Florida State.
But as he sat at his Hard Rock Stadium locker in full sweats, as his teammates changed out of their uniforms around him, Michigan's Heisman Trophy finalist cried.
"The fact we couldn't send these seniors out the right way, the fact that I couldn't play, that (stuff) just hurt," he said, wiping away tears and sniffling through his comments. "I couldn't even run. I told myself if I was at least 80% I was going to go. But at that point, you're just going to hurt the team if you can't run. They count on you to play a certain way."
Peppers tried.
From the time he injured his leg in a special teams drill Thursday, all the way through Friday's pregame warmup catching punts and running linebacker drills, he was hoping he could handle the pain.
"It was a joint decision," he said. "The trainers watched me warm up. I knew I wasn't myself, I knew I wasn't going to be myself ... If the game was Saturday (instead), I play in this game 100%. I felt as though I just needed that extra day. When you tweak something like a hamstring the day before the game, it''s kind of tough to recover from."
He said he did everything he could in the two days, from pain relievers to Icy Hot, to wrapping it up tight.
"It couldn't open up," he said. "I didn't want to risk further injury or hurt the team."
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When it was announced that Peppers wouldn't play just before game time, skeptics immediately pointed to him trying to preserve his potential NFL draft status, that he was following Stanford's Christian McCaffrey and LSU's Leonard Fournette.
Peppers, who insisted he still hasn't decided if he'll enter the draft, said that didn't play a factor.
"I just stopped taking everything for granted (after that), there were things I was taking for granted," Peppers said. "I couldn't care less about what people think why I didn't play. The fact that I couldn't be out there with my brothers, I think that hurt more than the loss. ... My future didn't play any role in this."
His NFL status remains the elephant in the room for this Michigan football off-season and Peppers said he doesn't even know when the early-entry deadline is -- it's Jan. 16 -- but he said he'll probably take his decision up the limit.
The discussion will bounce between him and his mother but may include his coaches and teammates also. In the emotions of early Saturday morning, he hand no definite answers.
"Got some decisions to make, still feel like I didn't do what I set out to do, as an individual and as a team," he said. "We didn't make the playoffs, didn't make the Rose Bowl. And to come here and lose the Orange Bowl just sucked. Because we worked too hard for it."
He is projected as a first-round pick by nearly all analysts and some have him as high as the top 15.
That was far from his mind as he sat at his locker after the game.
"The fact that you could have impacted the game, in a one-point game, it just sucks," he said. "It just really sucks."
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