The bottom line is, somebody appeared to sabotage Tunsil – his Instagram account was also compromised – for whatever reason; somebody decided that if they had pieces of “evidence,” they might as well post them at the worst possible time. And because this is the NFL draft, and because every team is seeking a reason not to pick someone, Tunsil slid down the draft board, all the way to the Miami Dolphins at number 13. It is a video that may wind up costing him millions of dollars, and maybe your knee-jerk reaction is blame Tunsil for that. But maybe it also says something about our obsession with an event that is essentially an excuse to obsess over stupid things.
Over the past week, I spoke to quarterbacks Jared Goff and Carson Wentz, who wound up being the top two picks in the draft on Thursday night. In the process, they both had to endure bizarre snap judgments about their hand-size and about their ability to endure cold weather; they had to endure the prodigious stream of third-hand rumors and misinformation and half-truths that wound up emanating out of every mock draft they came across. This is what happens with the draft, and with pretty much everything else in modern life: The negative information piles up to the point that, as quarterback Ryan Lindley – who coached Goff and Wentz in the lead-up to the draft – told me, “All of sudden, some teams don’t want to pick anybody in the first couple of rounds.”
I suppose, in a way, this is what we want. I suppose this is why the NFL is perhaps the most compelling soap opera in this country. As Goff told me the other day, the NFL needs the draft to be played out over the course of months in order to maintain fan interest throughout the otherwise stultifying months of the offseason. This is what Laremy Tunsil unwittingly provided to a pro football audience craving drama; whoever posted that video was conducting a social experiment, and at least for a few moments, for a few picks of this circus of an evening, panic and snap judgment wound up prevailing, as it so often does. I don’t have any idea if Laremy Tunsil will be a boom or a bust, but he just proved that, in both professional football and social media, the whim of the moment is all that matters.
Michael Weinreb is the author of Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games, now out in paperback. You can find him on Twitter @michaelweinreb