Was this the weirdest moment in modern NFL draft history? Was this one of the strangest moments in the entire shadowy history of Twitter, at least as it relates to professional sports? I think it was, and I think it was because it combined two of the most capricious American pastimes you can imagine: Social media, and the draft itself. Both are based almost entirely on fleeting impressions, on groupthink, on the tyranny of snap judgments and on the notion that any piece of negative information is potentially deterministic.
Laremy Tunsil, for reasons unknown, just happened to stumble into the vortex of all that. At the very least, he stole the spotlight away from Ezekiel Elliott’s crop top.
There are so many questions here, obviously, because even if this was Tunsil in the video, I can’t imagine that he was dumb enough to post it himself. And I know that there are legitimate questions about Tunsil’s background and family history and how that might affect his focus, and I know that perhaps if he didn’t already have those things in his background, this video might not have landed with the same impact. But you know what? It probably would have, because the NFL is a massive corporate engine that isn’t willing to acknowledge the notion that marijuana is now legal in several states, and I imagine if Tunsil had been slugging from a beer bong the Tennessee Titans wouldn’t have given much of a shit at all and might have snapped him up with the eighth pick. (If it had been a more violent video, given the rampant inconsistency of the NFL’s reactions to such incidents, who the hell knows?)