Cornerback prospect Janoris Jenkins was kicked off the Florida Gators’ football team last April after three marijuana-related arrests. Jenkins opted against the NFL supplemental draft, and played his senior season for Terry Bowden at North Alabama.
But Jenkins didn’t turn over a new leaf.
NFL Network’s Albert Breer reports that Jenkins has revealed in pre-draft team interviews that he didn’t stop smoking at the Division II school. While the truthfulness is somewhat honorable, league executives weren’t exactly pleased to hear it.
“This is a multiple offender of the drug policy in college, and it’s not like there were no character concerns at North Alabama,” one AFC personnel executive told Breer. “He had multiple opportunities to get away from it. He didn’t at Florida, and he went to North Alabama and he wasn’t clean there. ... It was more of the same.”
Several, if not most, NFL evaluators consider Jenkins the second best on-field cornerback prospect in the 2012 draft, behind only LSU’s Morris Claiborne. But Jenkins may not even be drafted in the first round.
“He gets to North Alabama, and he’s still smoking because he’s got this big-fish, little-pond thing going,” one NFC executive said. “I don’t see him going in the first round, and a lot of teams have him off their board completely.”
An AFC college scout told Breer that he doesn’t believe Jenkins is a bad guy. But he still would want no part of Jenkins in the first round of the draft.
“He’s not a bad person,” said the scout. “He just makes a lot of dumb, dumb mistakes. He just smokes and [has sex], and that’s essentially what it is. ... And there’s just awful decision-making associated with that. I don’t think he’s a bad person. But he has a lot of soul-searching to do.
“I wouldn’t touch him in the first round.”