It looks like Commissioner Roger Goodell needs to send out yet another memo.
Two weeks after the leak of LSU cornerback Morris Claiborne’s Wonderlic score prompted Goodell to remind all 32 teams that “certain information obtained during preparations for the Draft, including personal and family details, results of drug tests, scores on the Wonderlic test, and the like, are strictly confidential for club use only and are not to be disseminated publicly under any circumstances,” the TV network/website owned by the NFL has aided and abetted a violation of the terms of that very memo.
Jason La Canfora of NFL Network reports that Ohio State offensive lineman Mike Adams tested positive for marijuana at the Scouting Combine.
Adams, as La Canfora explains it, didn’t know about the positive result when meeting with teams at the Scouting Combine. Obviously, Adams wouldn’t have known; the results aren’t made available until well after the players have left Indy.
But Adams surely knew that he’d smoked marijuana, and if anything he said to teams about marijuana use during Combine interviews was later contradicted by the positive test result, that could be viewed as a far more significant problem than the positive test result.
Teams generally don’t care about marijuana use. They care about whether, if forced to choose between football and marijuana, the player will choose football. Most do, providing clean samples during the repeated unannounced tests performed until the player graduates from the substance-abuse program. But some, like former NFL running back Onterrio Smith, can’t quit smoking. And as a result they have to quit playing. And the team that drafted a player who ultimately can’t play ends up holding accountable the people who drafted him.
Making a positive test at the Scouting Combine an even larger red flag is the fact that the players know they’re going to be tested. Thus, as many league sources have told PFT over the years, anyone who tests positive at the Combine either has an addiction, or is incredibly dumb.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how the NFL will deal with the fact that the news-gathering entity it owns is inducing league sources to violate the confidentiality of the pre-draft process. Last week, Albert Breer of NFL Network reported that cornerback Janoris Jenkins admitted to three teams during pre-draft interviews that he smoked marijuana at North Alabama.
Whatever Goodell does in response to these reports, it would be fitting for the memo to be dated Friday, April 20.