Linebacker Alec Ogletree’s play during the 2012 season at Georgia had many people talking about him as a potential first-round pick in April, but a DUI arrest just before the combine raised a red flag that clouded the picture.
Ogletree said that he met with 25 teams in Indianapolis and said that teams approached the interviews differently. Some of them asked a lot of questions about the arrest and his previous suspension for a positive drug test in college while some wanted to talk more about football after asking about the arrest, but that the end result was that half the questions he fielded had to do with his brush with the law.
“It was pretty much 50-50,” Ogletree said, via NFL.com. “They asked me, ‘Why should we believe you?’ and stuff like that. Once I gave them an answer, they took what they needed from me and basically moved to the football aspect.”
Ogletree felt that all the interviews went well, although that hardly means he’s still on track to go at the top of the draft. He’ll go somewhere, though, because, for better or worse, talent wins out over just about everything else when NFL teams are looking to stock their rosters. What he does with that shot, be it in the first round or somewhere much later in that process, will have much more to do with Ogletree’s NFL outlook than anything that happened before he was a pro.