“A very unique personality – the guy’s gonna’ rub some people the wrong way, and he’s not gonna’ be the cleanest guy in your building.”
— Anonymous NFL executive from an AFC team
This quote was provided – anonymously – by an executive of an NFL team who was talking about Georgia defensive lineman Jalen Carter.
It was published under the byline of a fairly prominent reporter covering the league, and while I’m linking to the story, I don’t want to focus on who wrote it because my complaint isn’t about his coverage in particular but reflects a much deeper more pervasive fault in the coverage of the draft in general. The appetite for information has caused reporters to lower the standards of sourcing — regularly concealing the source of information — and focusing on information that relates to the players, and nothing with regard to the teams.
The result is coverage that casts a large amount of shade on what amounts to a job applicant while diverting scrutiny from where it could – and I would argue should – be placed, which is on the criteria teams use to make their selections. The coverage of Georgia defensive lineman Jalen Carter is a dramatic example of this.
If you’re not familiar with him, he’s a defensive tackle from the two-time national champions that some people consider the best player in the draft. He also has a demonstrated habit of driving (dangerously) fast, which I previously wrote about. On Wednesday — at Georgia’s pro day — he was 9 pounds heavier than he was at the combine, and looked winded and was cramping during position drills, according to this report from ESPN.com. I firmly believe he’s going to be on the board and available when the Seahawks pick at No. 5 and over the next couple of months you’re going to hear a lot of coded language about him. Like that quote at the top of the story from Anonymous Football Man: “He’s not gonna’ be the cleanest guy in the building.”
That phrasing is pure draft speak, rooted in the fact that a draft prospect whose medical tests show no concerns is said to be “clean.” There’s no sign of a pre-existing injury that you have to worry about.
Now, it’s often applied to behavior, and in this case, Anonymous Football Man is saying that Carter is going to be someone you have to worry about to a certain extent. However, this has a wide range of potential meanings. It could mean someone whose attendance or effort level is spotty or a player who tends to be argumentative or disruptive. It could mean someone who is known to lead an active social life or even to be a firearms enthusiast, neither of which are necessarily illegal it should be noted, and it could also mean someone who has been suspected of – perhaps even accused of committing – an actual crime.
And here’s the thing, from a purely football perspective, teams might wind up being more concerned about behaviorial traits as they are about other — more serious — allegations. After all, their primary decision-making tree from a football sense goes something like this:
How good is this player capable of being?
How much of that potential is he likely to fulfill given everything we know about him?
How well is he going to fit into a team environment?
The question of a criminal history or worrisome off-field behavior is not entirely unrelated, but it is a different category. Some players have done something that causes a team to take him off their board entirely, meaning they won’t consider drafting him in any situation.
Now everything I just mentioned could fall under the category of a player who’s “not clean.” So when Anonymous Football Man says Carter is “not gonna’ be the cleanest guy in the building” what, exactly does he mean?
The reporter has the chance to ask, and he very well may have. But there’s no indication he asked and even if he did, the lack of an answer gives the game away.
The object of NFL draft coverage as it is currently practiced in this country is not about fairness or accuracy, but about ferreting out as much information as possible about the players who are being pored over while revealing very little about the decision-making process of the teams that are making those decisions.
From a business perspective, this works find for reporters. There’s a seemingly endless appetite for this information, and feeding that beast means there is an incentive for a reporter not to press the best sources of information for fear they’ll stop returning calls or cease providing insight.
Turns out that most sports reporters are easier to house train than a dog. They learn pretty quickly which treats are for them and where not to pee, and since they provide a steady flow of information that their audience enjoys perhaps it doesn’t need to be any deeper than that.
But something is lost when a reporter stops scrutinizing the information that comes from a source and starts simply conveying it. What’s lost is the willingness to interrogate not just the quality of that information, but the decision-making that went into it. You wind up quoting someone saying “he’s not gonna’ be the cleanest guy in your building” without taking any time to root around in what that exactly means.
In fact, I’m now going to show you the full quote from Anonymous Football Man as it appeared in the story because it discusses questions regarding Carter’s work ethic:
“The questions about effort stem from how easy everything comes for him. The guy has had to work, but the way he moves, it’s so easy for him. Like, take Aidan Hutchinson last year, he was upright, stiff, and the guy just will himself into becoming a great player. Jalen, you feel like, could take two months off and be the same guy. It comes very easy for him. He’s just really gifted and with a motor that doesn’t run that hot, it adds up to a streaky, unpredictable dude.”
Now, I want to be very careful here because he’s talking about very specific players, and this may be a factually accurate assessment. However, it also conforms to a pretty well-established stereotype in which the athleticism and natural ability of Black athletes is accentuated while white players get praised for their work ethic, they’re understanding of fundamentals. And when I read that quote, that’s immediately where my mind, and my immediate question is whether Anonymous Football Man had this particular blindspot. We don’t know. We don’t even know who this guy is, and so the scrutiny remains on the guy that is named in Carter and to a lesser extent, Hutchinson, who probably isn’t thrilled to be called an upright, stiff guy who tries real hard.
And so here we come to the devil’s bargain that at some point anyone who talks to NFL sources is asked to make:
Do you seek answers to the actually important questions?
Or
Do you seek to convey as much inside information as you can?
The first approach runs the risk of your source clamming up, which poses a problem in its own right. Why will people read you if the people who know things aren’t talking to?
The second approach runs an even greater risk, in my opinion because it turns you into a laundry service for the process that you’re supposed to be covering. I understand why so many reporters choose this route because I’ve done it myself. I was pretty easy to house-train, too.
In a larger sense, the evaluation of Carter’s professional prospects embodies the core challenge for any NFL team when it comes to selecting employees: How do you balance the enormous athletic talent and potential of this player against the risk that his on-field performance may may be undercut by any number of factors from his work ethic to his desire to drive fast.
I think teams are much better at answering this question with regard to a player’s physical abilities — his talent and his tools — then they are when it comes to evaluating the impact his “character” will have on the likelihood of him maximizing those talents. We’d have a better idea of why if the people who cover this sport were as critical of the guys who were providing them with information as they are of the players that information relates to.