Kadarius Toney will opt out of 2020 Cotton Bowl, enter 2021 NFL Draft

Florida Gators wide receiver Kadarius Toney will opt out of the 2020 Cotton Bowl and plans to enter the 2021 NFL Draft, he announced Monday on Twitter.

Toney had been photographed practicing with Florida over the weekend, but playing in the Cotton Bowl against Oklahoma would have been a high-risk move with little to no reward: Toney, like all-everything tight end Kyle Pitts before him, just put an exclamation point on his collegiate career in the SEC Championship Game against Alabama.

And for Toney, the eight-catch, 153-yard, one-touchdown performance against the Crimson TIde was a second consecutive emphatic statement of greatness, following a nine-catch, 182-yard, one-touchdown night against LSU that also featured 56 rushing yards. Toney’s consecutive games of more than 200 all-purpose yards were the first two of his career, and finish off a year in which he compiled 1,439 all-purpose yards, the most by a Gator since Percy Harvin.

Toney won’t get to become the first Florida pass-catcher since Taylor Jacobs in 2003 to crack 1,000 receiving yards in a season, missing that milestone by a mere 16 yards, but he did everything necessary in a spectacular senior season to erase any perceptions of him as an overrated gimmick and replace them with visions of multi-faceted deployment in an inventive NFL offense.

For a guy who raps as Yung Joka, making himself a joker card is some feat.