For the most part, it has been common practice among the better agents in the NFL, and around the sporting world, to make sure that they scrub their clients’ social media pages of questionable material that they may have posted over the course of their lives leading up to the draft, in whatever respective league they may be looking to enter.
While it’s hard to imagine something so incriminating as to prevent one’s entirely being drafted to go unchecked for so long, there’s no doubt that some posts on social media can damage a player’s stock. It could speak to character issues that some teams more than others would be inclined to consider grounds for removing entirely from their draft board.
This year, with the NFL Draft taking place in a very different manner, the league appears to intend to prominently feature player Tweets as part of their broadcast. And according to Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, he has been told by a league source that the NFL has advised agents to “proactively scrub” Tweets from prospects accounts to assure that they don’t suddenly pop up.
Florio expands on the report by saying the league has gone so far as to give agents detailed instructions as to how to go about sanitizing their clients’ social media profiles, as, occasionally, certain sorts of posts may be difficult to track down over time.
As I said, the better agents already do this, and sometimes even the more heady players are conscious of this beforehand. While there was nothing wrong with his Tweets, last year, second-overall pick Nick Bosa, who would go on to win the Defensive Rookie of the Year Award, made the decision to delete some pro-Trump and anti-Colin Kaepernick comments he made in the past, in part because he was aware there was a very good chance he would end up with the San Francisco 49ers (which, of course, he did).
It’s more difficult for younger individuals to have the foresight of understanding that everything you put out there has the potential to reflect back on you at some point. Some things may have been said long before they have even entertained the possibility that they would someday be a celebrity.
Then again, you could still run the risk of a Laremy Tunsil situation, though his draft stock ultimately didn’t suffer as much as it could, and pretty soon he is going to become the richest offensive lineman in the history of the game, so…sometimes it works out to do a bong hit through a gasmask and make sure somebody’s rolling the tape. It sure is one hell of a story, at least. I would say one hell of a memory, but he may not remember.
