Can’t you just see it coming? While this is going to sound incredibly crass, is there any doubt that most decision-makers in the NFL universe are going to end up justifying a way to draft Jalen Carter, no matter what the proceeding few weeks look like?
Can’t you just hear it? Sorry to be impatient, but can we hurry this up a bit? The part about the eventual outcome of the legal process and the series of events that led to his operating a speeding car after hours resulting in an alleged road race, a pair of deceased human beings and a police report that alleges Carter lied to authorities about it?
Carter, in a statement released from the combine Wednesday, denied all of this, of course, and said he’ll be fully exonerated when the truth is revealed. He was back at the NFL scouting combine Thursday in Indianapolis after spending all of 16 minutes between being booked and released from police custody in Athens, Ga.
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports
The Georgia defensive tackle is probably going to be a top-five draft pick, and if he’s not, there are going to be plenty of coaches and GMs who wish they could make him one. Someone is going to stand up on a podium on draft night and talk about how they were “comfortable with the situation,” how they got to know Carter as a person and how, once they get him in the building, he’ll be a part of the team’s magical culture. Maybe this will be God’s honest truth. Maybe they’ll have spent so much time drawing up a defense that requires Carter at the heart of it, that they really don’t care.
There’s no way for us to know. As many coaches, general managers and owners who exist out there hoping they can help, rehabilitate and mentor, there are twice as many who see winning as a bottom-line ticket to job security, accolades and personal fame. That almost always requires a bending of personal ethics to make it there.
We don’t know everything about Carter, and he deserves his chance to tell his side of the story, just as the families of Chandler LeCroy and Devin Willock deserve to know the entire truth about why their sons and daughters had their lives cut short. We also can’t be in a position as a sport or as a society where we banish someone from their occupation forever because of a past issue that they don’t get the chance to learn from or grow through. But we do know that we aren’t going to get that kind of story via the current sports media sausage grinder, which will, at best, hold Carter accountable only long enough to serve as a draft-night curiosity who will drive ratings, and, at worst, diminish the absolute center of this story: that lives were lost, broken and changed forever.
Sorry for being cynical, too, but we have all seen the NFL draft. We have all seen how a player with some type of red flag—to be clear, we are not comparing this situation to that of any player who came into the draft with another pending legal matter or another life event that may have caused teams to hesitate in drafting them—gets positioned as a kind of reality-show plot twist, with the details of the allegations being read like the fast-forwarded side-effect chatter at the end of a prescription drug commercial.
So let’s just get there.
Personally, I’ll admit to being suckered by it all before. Where would Joe Mixon land? What would happen to Laremy Tunsil? Wow, what did Josh Allen tweet as a child, and why did it suspiciously land in our consciousness hours before the first round?
Most of the time, we are led back to the same conclusion: It doesn’t really matter.
Again, we’re not comparing Carter to anyone. All we know at this point is that a warrant was issued for his arrest, and an arraignment hearing is scheduled for mid-April. He has basically been put on notice by a judge to appear at a point in time and plead not guilty. The charges against him are misdemeanor offenses—racing and reckless driving—which would almost certainly not result in jail time. Your best guess as to the reason why all of this was released moments before he was scheduled to speak at a massive media event are as good as mine (and I’ll bet your best guess is a pretty good one).
In the meantime, we can just choose not to take part in all of it. The character assessments by anonymous NFL executives who, up until the moment this happened, were comfortable placing him atop their draft boards (that is, unless you’re reading colleague Albert Breer, who is talking to the people who seemed to have suspicions about Carter before these charges were announced). The earnest questions to podium-speaking general managers about what makes a player undraftable in their eyes. All of it. Because we know the answer.
I’ll see you all on draft night. Who else is coming with me?
