Teams Get Creative In Quest For The Truth

The pre-draft process is, in many respects, a charade. The high-end prospects become schooled in what to say and what not to say, and the real man lurks somewhere behind a carefully-crafted facade. The high-priced consultants now have new fodder for their clients -- beware of Facebook and MySpace. According to Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports, some teams actually are using counterfeit accounts on the popular social-networking sites to help smoke out the truth about the players in whom sizable financial investments might be made. “It works like magic,” one source told Robinson of the practice of creating “ghost profiles,” which disappear after the draft. “Twenty years ago, if you weren’t getting a lot from a [college team’s] coaching staff or a family, you might put weeks into gathering good information on a couple guys,” the source told Robinson. “Now, we can do a lot of it in a few days. We can sit down with 20 guys that we might be looking at, and have a pile of pictures and background things to hit them with. And every once in a while you come across something that probably saves you from making a big mistake. Not as much as you might think, but if it happens every couple years, it keeps you ahead of the game.” Apart from the creation of phony accounts, NFL teams (like most employers) look to a potential employee’s Facebook and MySpace pages for evidence of troubling traits or behaviors. Vikings V.P. of player personnel Rick Spielman shared a story from a couple of years ago regarding the MySpace page of a player Spielman declined to name. “He had a big picture of a bunch of drug money and drugs on a carpet,” Spielman said. “It was the kind of thing that, you know, it was under his name. So when we had some time with him, of course we were like ‘What is this all about?’ . . . It was an interesting conversation. He had a legitimate explanation for what happened and we followed up on it and we believe it was what he said it was. But that’s one of the things that happens [with networking profiles].” Defensive tackle Walter Thomas raised eyebeows two years ago with his MySpace page, to which the following comment was added, apparently by one of his friends, after Thomas signed a free-agent deal with the Saints: “Well its a good thing I got you to sign a whole bunch of sh-t so I can say ‘yea, I used to get high with him and eat 5 cheeseburgers every wednesday!’” Thomas later apologized for the content of the profile -- and the apology still appears on the profile today. (Then again, he last logged in to the profile on July 17, 2007.) Bottom line? It’s virtually impossible to completely conceal the entire truth about a potential draft pick. So if any team takes a turd without knowing about the turd’s turdishness in advance, it’s the team’s own fault.