His position coach, Burton Burns, was no longer in his ear and telling him to go to class. Then again, there was no class to attend. The 15-hour, semester-long course load had vanished along with the evening study halls and mandatory 6 a.m. workouts that ensured he’d be occupied from dawn until dusk.

All of a sudden Trent Richardson was bored with a lot of time on his hands and millions of dollars in his bank account.

“What do I do now?” he asked himself.

It was a question that gnawed at the former Alabama running back in his early days in the NFL after the Cleveland Browns selected him with the third overall pick in the 2012 draft.

It’s also one he struggled to answer at the outset of his career, allowing an unresolved problem to fester before it was too late and he was spit out of the league four years after he entered it.

“You need to know how to have time management,” he explained. “You have to have a strict schedule.”

It’s the best advice Richardson had to offer on the eve of the NFL draft last week. In the days that followed, ten Alabama players were selected and several more signed pro contracts as rookie free agents. Together, they will have to make the awkward transition from the exacting, regulated world within the walls of Nick Saban’s program to the less-restrictive ecosphere of professional football where personal responsibility and self-discipline are necessary for survival.

“It’s obviously a tough adjustment, just like from high school to college,” said former Alabama running back Damien Harris, who was drafted in the third round by the New England Patriots on Friday. “You’re going to have your struggles, but it’s just about adapting. Are you mentally tough enough to overcome the lack of, I would say, guidance you have in college? In college you got people telling you when to go to class, when to go to study hall, when to eat, when to work out, do this and do that. In the NFL they just send you a fine. So it’s definitely one of the biggest challenges people said they have faced.”

For all the Crimson Tide does to prepare its best talent for the next level with expert instruction and access to resources available at the top tier of the sport, it deviates from the NFL model in one key aspect: It exerts far more control over its players than professional organizations do over theirs.

It’s here in Tuscaloosa where Alabama Football becomes a cocoon for those initiated into this exclusive fraternity. It does all it can to shield its members from any potential trouble and pitfalls that could ensnare them. To create this bubble, Saban relies on an army of workers.

“We have a great support staff,” he said. “It’s indicated by the personal development programs that we have, the progress that we make with our players as people, the great history of academic success that we have, and the people that we have helping our players and the system that we have that helps our players develop the kind of habits that help them be successful. We have a career development program. We have great nutrition program. We have a great medical staff. We’ve got a good group of coaches who do a great job of teaching and developing players, which is sort of been the history around here in terms of the number of guys that had great success here.”

On some days, Richardson would work out at 6 or 7 a.m., attend five classes, practice, get treatment in the training room, and then take care of his homework at study hall until the midnight hour approached.

Upon arriving in the NFL, his daily routine had changed dramatically and became less demanding. He would find himself leaving the team facility in the mid-afternoon with no other obligations the rest of the day.

“You don’t have people pulling or you telling you have to go here and you don’t have Nick Saban or your position coach checking on you all the time,” Richardson said.

With no outside counsel, he admittedly turned lazy and became distracted by those in his inner circle asking for money, succumbing to outside pressures that detracted from his performance between the lines.

“My stuff off-the field stuff, as far as having peace outside of football, it’s what drove me not to love the game no more at the time,” Richardson said.

But Richardson is not the only former Alabama star to suffer an abject fate in the NFL. After becoming the nation’s top college linebacker, Rolando McClain became unmoored in Oakland, where he had been drafted with the eighth overall pick in 2010. Multiple arrests sidetracked him before drug suspensions spelled the end of his career. Since leaving Alabama two years ago, Reuben Foster has also faced his share of legal problems that have jeopardized his future in the NFL. The former first-round pick was cut by San Francisco in November and has since resurfaced with the Washington Redskins, where he is surrounded by many former Alabama teammates.

“You’re a young kid, you have a lot of money all of a sudden, you have a lot of freedom off the field and you’ve got to grow up in a hurry,” said 49ers general manager John Lynch. “That’s a challenge for any college kid and that’s part of what we try to do here and throughout this whole process, is ascertain who can handle that. Also, ascertain, ‘Okay, if we bring someone in, how do we provide that structure?’ Yes, it is more difficult at the professional level.”

Richardson learned that the hard way. But it’s a lesson he hopes will be grasped immediately by the latest crop of Alabama players to enter the league, where a premium is placed on individual accountability.

“In the NFL,” he said, “you’ve got to be a grown man.”

After all, the college days are over.

Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin