The Making of a Comeback
What is still in store for Evan Neal?
For most of his playing career, Evan Neal has lived in a world of certainty.
In high school, he was the kind of lineman coaches warned their players about all week and still could not solve on Friday night. Too big. Too powerful. Too athletic. He was not just winning. He was overwhelming. The five star labels followed, and so did the expectations.
At Alabama, those expectations did not crush him. They refined him.
Neal became exactly what the prototype promised. A cornerstone. A starter on one of college football’s biggest stages. He won a national championship. He earned All American honors. He played multiple positions along the offensive line and did it at a level that made NFL scouts comfortable projecting him as a franchise pillar. When the New York Giants selected him seventh overall in the 2022 NFL Draft, it felt less like a gamble and more like a formality.
Some careers feel pre written.
But the NFL has a way of rewriting stories.
The league does not just test your body. It tests your technique. Your confidence. Your identity. The things that made Neal special did not disappear when he reached the professional level, but the game around him got faster, and far less forgiving.
What followed was not the smooth ascension many expected. There were struggles in pass protection. There were injuries. There were position changes. There was the weight that comes with being a top ten pick in a market that is always searching for someone to blame. Slowly, the conversation around Evan Neal shifted from what he could become to whether he ever would.
That is a dangerous place for any player to live.
But sometimes the most dangerous player in the league is not the one everyone is talking about. It is the one everyone has stopped talking about.
This offseason, Neal made a quiet but meaningful decision. He signed with AMDG Sports and will begin working under the guidance of LeCharles Bentley.
If that name sounds familiar, it should.
Bentley is not in the business of shortcuts or hype. He is a craftsman. He has built a reputation on detail, skill acquisition, innovation and telling players the truth about what their game actually requires. And when Bentley talks about Evan Neal, the language is telling.
He does not talk about a broken player.
He talks about an unpolished one.
That distinction matters.
Unpolished means the raw material is still there. It means the tools still exist. It means the story is not about starting over, but about finally learning how to shape what has always been present.
Bentley stated, “This stage of Evan’s career requires informed work, not guesswork. I’ve lived the full lifecycle of this position in the NFL, development, success, adversity, and transition. So I understand where he’s at, but I can’t meet him there. My focus is to remind him how simple football truly is. It’s only hard when players allow it to be, and that’s how career and developmental momentum stalls.”
For Neal, this is not just about cleaning up technique or adjusting footwork. It is about reclaiming his relationship with the game. About slowing things back down. About rebuilding trust in his hands, his eyes, and his instincts. About remembering that dominance is not something you declare. It is something you execute, rep after rep.
There is a certain humility required to walk this path.
The Giants and the rest of the league will not hand Evan Neal anything. Nor should they. The NFL is not moved by pedigree or memory. It is moved by performance.
That is what makes this pairing so intriguing.
Bentley has built his life’s work around the idea that offensive line play is a skill, not just a size contest. That violence must be precise. That footwork is a language. That hands tell the truth. That consistency is built, not hoped for.
Neal brings rare physical tools. Bentley brings rare developmental clarity.
Somewhere in the middle of that intersection is a version of this story that looks very different from the one people have been telling.
Redemption stories in the NFL are never guaranteed. The league is too hard. The margins are too thin. The clock moves too fast.
But every so often, one appears because a player refuses to accept that his first chapter was the whole book.
Evan Neal is still young. Still massive. Still gifted. Still unfinished.
The question is no longer whether he was once great.
The question is whether this offseason becomes the moment he finally learns how to become it again on his own terms.