At the Scouting Combine in February, a room assigned to receivers DeAndre Hopkins and Mark Harrison (pictured) reportedly was trashed. Not with broken furniture or other property damage but with toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, partially-eaten food on the bed, and feces and urine on the bathroom floor.
Though young men should behave more responsibly, does anyone really think a team that wants the player won’t pick him because he may or may not have pooped on the floor?
Teams routinely draft players who have done far worse than allegedly defile the bathroom tile. And before playing the “it’s a job interview” card, why is it not a “job interview” when teams are asking a player if he likes girls?
This isn’t a normal employment setting. That reality works to the NFL’s benefit when exploring ordinarily forbidden topics like sexuality. It should work to the players’ benefit when teams would be inclined to wag their fingers over something fairly trivial like this.
It also underscores our (or at least my) developing concern about the draft process. Though it’s never going away, it’s fundamentally unfair to not let an employee decide where he’s going to work.
More importantly for these purposes, the fact that the applicant has no say over which of 32 distinct employers for whom he’ll be working make this situation far different than a prospective Apple employee dropping an uncontained road apple in his hotel.