Spring 2007
Character Counts
Now more than ever, NFL teams are going to great lengths to endure that their draft investments have the moral fiber to sustain a successful career in pro football.
By Pete Williams
Street & Smith's NFL Draft preview
Last season, the Cincinnati Bengals squandered their playoff chances, losing the last three games to finish 8-8. Over the course of a 13-month period that included the 2006 season, nine Bengals players were arrested. Of those nine, six were drafted in 2005 or 2006, and the majority of those were involved in off-the-field problems in college.
Many NFL officials believe there’s a direct correlation between the Bengals late-season collapse in 2006 and their draft-day philosophy. Cincinnati, unlike most teams, has virtually ignored the “character issue” in recent years, not shying away from picking players with a history of criminal and disciplinary issues in college.
Most teams, when evaluating players for the NFL Draft, place a premium on character and weigh a player’s off-the-field and locker room behavior before making a selection. They do so not only to avoid potential future embarrassment for the franchise, but also to make sure the team receives a good return on their investment.
“Character is a pretty good indication of whether you’ll live up to your ability,” says Seattle Seahawks General Manager Tim Ruskell. “It’s all about potential. Do you want the guy that has the ability but isn’t going to reach that potential?”
In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, much was made of the character of head coaches Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, both soft-spoken, devout Christians who expect their players to act like role models on and off the field.
Dungy, Smith, Bears general manager Jerry Angelo, and Ruskell were all part of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers organization in the late 1990s. Unlike previous Tampa regimes, they weighed character heavily on draft day. Along with General Manager Rich McKay, now in a similar role with the Falcons, the group turned a perennially hapless franchise into a Super Bowl contender.
The cornerstones of the Tampa Bay’s resurgence were players like Derrick Brooks, Warrick Dunn, and John Lynch, none of whom were viewed as a can’t-miss prospect. But McKay and Dungy believed they were more likely to succeed with high-character overachievers than blue-chip prospects who had character issues.
Brooks, Dunn, and Lynch became perennial Pro Bowlers and among the most civic-minded players in the NFL. This year, Dunn and Lynch joined Peyton Manning as the finalists for the annual Bart Starr Award (Lynch won it), which honors the Hall-of-Fame Green Bay quarterback’s lifelong commitment to service. All three have played for Dungy, as has Brooks, who previously won the award in 2003.
Dungy developed his character-focused draft philosophy playing while playing for and serving as an assistant under longtime Steelers Coach Chuck Noll, whose stellar drafts included the 1974 haul of four future Hall-of-Famers (center Mike Webster, middle linebacker Jack Lambert, and wide receivers Lynn Swann and John Stallworth).
“Coach Noll always evaluated the player and the person,” Dungy says. “There are a lot of talented football players around, but not everybody is going to make your team better. It’s important to have guys who are good teammates, that fit in well, that are going to impact you positively, and character is a big part of that.”
Character is a broad term in NFL circles, but teams usually divide it into “football character” and “personal character.” Football character refers more to on-field and locker-room traits such as work ethic, film study, hustle, and leadership. Personal character is more of a citizenship rating and focuses on discipline, academic commitment, integrity and accountability.
For all of the time NFL scouts spend watching tape and attending college football practices, they spend longer hours researching character, interviewing everyone connected with a player. Scouts always interview college coaches, teammates, and athletic department officials, but the more thorough ones talk to roommates, high school coaches, football-office secretaries and even local policemen.
At times, the job of scout seems more like that of detective or investigative reporter, relying on sources to provide off-the-record information. Even then, it can be difficult to get the complete picture.
“Nobody wants to tell you flat out if a guy has character issues,” says Ruskell, who has more than 20 years of scouting experience. “That’s where you have to read between the lines. You pick up hints. Once you’ve gotten even the hint of a red flag, even if you’re not told directly, then you start up the machine.”
Each team employs a former law enforcement official - some have ex-FBI or former Secret Service people on retainer - to perform background checks on players before the draft. The league’s head of security, Milt Ahlerich, is a former FBI assistant director.
In the months leading up to the draft, agents tell their clients to be truthful in answering questions about their past since teams likely know everything. McKay, a former attorney, often asks players questions about character-related incidents he knows the answer to just to gauge their level of truthfulness. Such responses, by themselves, become an indication of character.
NFL teams often go back so far in their investigations that players honestly don’t remember things. The Raiders’ Warren Sapp, who dropped from the top 10 in the 1995 draft after reports surfaced that he had tested positive for marijuana while at the University of Miami, marveled that teams “dug all the way back to things I did in the eighth grade.”
With so much on the line financially, teams find it worthwhile to spend more time on character research, especially with players they’re likely to draft. Character is sometimes all that separates two players. In 1998, Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning looked like comparable talents in terms of size and football talent. Some scouts believed Leaf had more upside, but Manning was taken No.1 by the Colts and Leaf second by San Diego.
Shortly after entering the league, Leaf clashed with teammates, Chargers’ officials and the media. He soon was gone from football, costing the team millions and setting the rebuilding process back years. Perhaps if San Diego had spent more time investigating Leaf’s character, it would have spent the No.2 pick on someone else, like perennial All-Pro cornerback Charles Woodson, who was selected fourth by Oakland.
“This is the reference side of the business taken as far as you can take it,” says McKay, who recently had to deal with the off-field shenanigans of Michael Vick, a player he didn’t draft. “When you hire an employee, you do the background check, the interview, and call all the references. What you’ve got to do is minimize the risk.”
The Falcons assign every draft-eligible player a double-letter grade from AA to FF representing football character and personal character. Rarely does Atlanta draft a player who has scored below a C in either category.
That means the Falcons, like other teams that weigh the character issue heavily, could be neglecting some talented players. In the 1998 book Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL, authors Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger investigated the criminal records of 509 NFL players from the 1996 season and concluded that about 21 percent of them (109) had been charged with a serious crime.
Some players have not let off-the-field issues keep them from dominating the game on the field. Most NFL executives will take the good with the bad when it comes to stars like Michael Irvin, Ray Lewis, and Lawrence Taylor.
Even McKay, for all of his emphasis on character, used his first-ever pick as a general manager in 1995 on Sapp, who came with baggage prior to the draft but has mostly stayed out of trouble since and might end up in the Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile, some players with impeccable backgrounds in college end up on police blotters in the NFL. The goal is to discover whether there’s a pattern of behavior. In recent years, the Bengals either have not done enough character research or decided to ignore it.
Linebacker Odell Thurman, suspended the first four games of last season for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy, saw his season end in late September after being arrested for drunk driving with teammates Chris Henry and Reggie McNeal in the car. Thurman had a lengthy rap sheet at the University of Georgia before Cincinnati drafted him in the second round in 2005. Wide receiver Henry, arrested four times in his young career, fell to the third round that year because of character issues during his career at West Virginia. His arrests include felony possession of a concealed firearm and possession of marijuana.
The Bengals didn’t let linebacker A.J. Nicholson’s tussles with the law while at Florida State keep them from spending a fifth-round pick on him last year. Within a month of being drafted, he was charged with vandalism and grand theft. Frostee Rucker was no angel at Southern Cal, but Cincinnati took him in the third round.
In the midst of it all, the Bengals selected Ahmad Brooks in last year’s supplemental draft. Brooks, a chronic underachiever at Virginia, had been kicked off the team for unspecified reasons. (Brooks has avoided trouble so far in the NFL.)
After last year’s first-round pick, Johnathan Joseph, was apprehended for marijuana possession in January, becoming the ninth Bengal arrested, team president Mike Brown pledged that the franchise would be more cognizant of character on draft day. “There may be some gifted athletes we won’t pick that we might have picked a year ago,” he said.
As Cincinnati has discovered, a troubled college career often translates into headaches for NFL employers. Adam “Pacman” Jones, chosen sixth overall by Tennessee out of West Virginia in 2005, has continued to have tangles with the law as a member of the Titans. The Broncos rolled the dice in the third round of the 2005 draft on Maurice Clarett, who now is serving a prison term of seven and a half years.
For most teams, passing on a Clarett or a Jones is an easy decision. The tougher, perhaps impossible, task is trying to predict how everyone else’s character will shape their NFL careers.
“Can you ever be 100 percent right on a guy? Of course not,” McKay says. “Some guys will start to hang out with the wrong people. They’ve never had money and now they’re in trouble. That’s going to happen. My concern is that we don’t go looking for those guys.”
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