With the NFL Draft two days away, general manager Rick Spielman is crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s.
Or, more specifically, “red-dotting” them. That’s Spielman’s term for crossing players off the team’s draft board. “Once we make that decision,” Spielman said of red-dotting, “then he’s not a Minnesota Viking.”
Associated with Vikings drafts for the past decade, Spielman has witnessed his fair share of players with character concerns around the league. Tyrann Mathieu (2013) had drug problems. Johnny Manziel (2014) partied too much. Laremy Tunsil (2016) was caught smoking … something … out of a gas mask on draft day.
Those are just a small handful of examples.
Every year there are hundreds of players to scout for each team, but as social media activity and smartphones have taken over the millennial landscape, Spielman and fellow GMs have been forced to exchange profiles of college game film for profiles on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.
“Try to minimize your risk as much as possible by getting the most information,” said Spielman.
Sometimes, the red flags are glaring and widely known.
The Vikings – and every team, for that matter – have been confronted with the prospect of selecting Joe Mixon, the uber-talented Oklahoma running back who hit a woman on video and has been linked to another confrontation. Reportedly, six teams have removed Mixon from their draft board completely.
Spielman wouldn’t confirm or deny that the Vikings, who may be in need of a young running back, had eliminated Mixon from their board, but he said the front office brain trust would weigh a multitude of factors to make an “organizational decision.”
“We present everything we have on paper,” Spielman said, “what the facts are, what the experts are saying, what type of kid this is, is it a one-time incident? Is it something where there may be a pattern there that we don’t want to deal with, so there’s so many other things that aren’t reported out there in the media that we know, and we’ll sit there and we’ll come up with, ‘What is the best decision for the organization?’”
the Vikings are not afraid to confront prospects with their findings
This is where social media research comes in. Minnesota is no stranger to it, having flagged a number of prospects back in 2014 due to posts about partying or drug use. In the three years since, the amount of social media activity has only increased. While Twitter is still the primary vessel for players to interact with fans, the meteoric rise of Instagram and Snapchat – and of course, the perpetual presence of Facebook – required the Vikings to call in reinforcements to audit the many accounts.
“We have a great social media staff here, and that’s their area of expertise, and I ask them specifically, go in and dig on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever all that stuff is and tell me what we know about these players,” said Spielman.
With so many players under consideration – and so many potential social media stumbling blocks for each — a deep dive on even one player may take hours – not including the surveillance required to keep up with new developments. Tuesday created a fresh uproar as first-round prospect Marshon Lattimore attempted to defend Gareon Conley on Twitter after Conley was accused of rape. The latter offense is certainly more severe, but the former may also give a team pause.
According to Spielman, the Vikings are not afraid to confront prospects with their findings. As far as the Vikings are concerned, a social media presence is part of a player’s resume.
“I know when we go into our formal interviews or when they come in here on a Top 30, I have a report with pictures and everything they’re posting on Instagram, what they’re posting on all their social media, and if it’s something that’s red-flagged, then we address it with them,” he said. “I think some of these players are surprised what we’re able to pull out.”
Not all missteps are created equal – not when talent is weighed into the equation
Locally speaking, Twitter has caused some great upheaval in recent years at the University of Minnesota. Former basketball player Kevin Dorsey Jr. had a video of a sexual encounter posted to his Twitter account, resulting in a season-long suspension and eventual transfer from the program.
Last December, the Gophers football program temporarily boycotted football activities and took to Twitter with the hashtag #WeHadEnough after a sex scandal led to numerous suspensions. The move, while viewed as courageous by some, was widely criticized for being tone deaf.
Bottom line, these missteps involved players very close to the ages Spielman and Co. are now investigating.
Chase Roullier, an interior lineman out of Wyoming who has met with the Vikings, does not have a Twitter account. He also has a clean record. As he told Zone Coverage on “The Draft Rap” podcast Monday, the interview process becomes much easier when you don’t have skeletons in the closet.
“It honestly isn’t that difficult,” said Roullier, a Minnesota native. “Some guys that have kind of a tough past, things that they’ve gotten in trouble with, they’re going to get drilled a little bit more in those interviews. A lot of those interviews go pretty smoothly for me. They ask if there are any issues in my past, it’s a pretty hard no for me, and then they kind of just move on, and then they move on to what I excel at.”
Inevitably, not all prospects will check out as cleanly as Roullier, giving the team a dilemma. What are they willing to tolerate? What risk are they willing to accept?
Not all missteps are created equal – not when talent is weighed into the equation.
“The less talented you are, the more red flags you have, probably the more likely you’re going to get a red dot,” said Spielman, “because is your talent worth the headache?”
