How Weed Can Change Sports Careers

I grew up as a fan of the Miami Dolphins. It was a hard team to cheer for. We haven’t won a playoff game in my entire life and have rarely come close to making them at all. The thing about cheering for a team that’s undergoing a perpetual “rebuild” is that all eyes and the hopes of the franchise rest on one event every year: the National Football League Draft. 

But in all my memories of the Dolphins’ draft day dreams and nightmares (mostly the latter), one draft feels particularly memorable: the 2016 NFL draft scandal featuring Laremy Tunsil. Tunsil was a star in the making, and everyone knew it. Scouting reports claimed that he “came into Ole Miss as a five-­star prospect and lived up to every bit of the hype.” He was considered a sure-fire top-five pick and a prospect that had all the makings of a perennial NFL starter. 

That was until a video from Tunsil’s official Twitter account circulated just 20 minutes before the draft began. The video showed him smoking from a gas mask bong and went viral in a matter of minutes, quickly spreading to teams’ war rooms. His agent was quick to say that his account had been hacked—Tunsil himself was not responsible for the posting—but the reputational damage was already done. The video spurred instant doubts about his off-the-field character and caused him to slide from a sought-after player to a pick that could fall out of the first round altogether. 

It’s important to note that the Tunsil draft-night video was accompanied by some other minor concerns, most notably his seven-game suspension in 2015 for receiving “impermissible financial benefits” as a student at Ole Miss. However, those doubts were not enough to hurt his draft stock until the video surfaced. 

My Dolphins were at the peak of their mediocrity in 2016, having just gone 6-10 in the 2015 season, and thus earned the eighth pick in the 2016 draft. The Dolphins traded down from the eighth pick to the 13th in a deal with the Philadelphia Eagles. In that deal, the Dolphins acquired some players that wouldn’t remain in Miami for very long, but that 13th pick would become by far the most important piece of the trade. The Dolphins decided to take a chance on Tunsil after seeing his draft-day slide, a move which ESPN described as “boom-or-bust.”

Early reports were quick to scrutinize the Dolphins for picking a player that had clear “character concerns,” in the words of ESPN. ESPN also warned that “Miami will offer a lot more temptations” for the young offensive tackle. 

These claims had surface-level merits. Marijuana was on the NFL’s list of banned substances at the time, and use would remain a suspendable offense in the NFL until 2020. However, the implications on Tunsil’s character were far-fetched. 

After all, Tunsil was not an unusual case in the NFL. An ESPN poll from later in 2016 indicated that over 70% of NFL players wanted weed to be legal in all 50 states. Weed use seemed to be an open secret in the league, too, with two-thirds of the 226 NFL players surveyed claiming that the NFL’s mandated drug-testing was easy to cheat. So why, then, at a time when legalization was spreading nationwide, and NFL teams knew that their players were using marijuana, did Tunsil’s reputation take such a significant hit?

I have come to a couple of conclusions. First, the shock factor of seeing a top prospect using a banned substance was enough to scare teams. It’s well-documented how any character concerns can damage an athlete’s rank. When one team starts passing on a player, the rest of the league follows suit, worrying that the teams that passed on a top prospect have uncovered even more negative information. 

The movie “Draft Day” demonstrates this phenomenon perfectly.

But the more important explanation about Tunsil’s story has to do with how the league regulates its players. Discipline and hard work are critical in football, but the idea that Tunsil could not use a recreational drug during the off-season at his own home is fundamentally flawed. This scandal came at a time when most of the country still saw weed as a controversial issue, much more so than it is today. Despite Tunsil’s apologies, the league thought that his weed use meant that he was not willing to conform to what his future teams would expect of him.

After the Dolphins picked Tunsil, he played three strong seasons in Miami before being part of a blockbuster trade with the Houston Texans, which earned the Dolphins three high picks in exchange, setting them up for a series of picks that would net them star receivers Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle. Tunsil has been a consistent NFL starter for the last 10 years and has made five Pro Bowl appearances as a Texan, before leaving Houston to join the Washington Commanders last year.

Though this journey is of interest, most importantly, Tunsil was never suspended during his NFL career. The character concerns that drove down his draft stock were ultimately overblown, and his weed use was never a problem in the league again. 

His story tells us a lot about how the NFL—and perhaps large sporting franchises in general—can panic when they think a player won’t follow their unreasonable restrictions and, arguably more importantly, how rapidly opinions about weed use have shifted in America. If the Tunsil scandal happened now, it wouldn’t be anywhere near front-page news. Most teams would probably pay little attention to the video entirely. 

Tunsil’s story also says a lot about resilience. His career seemed to have a terrible start, with media outlets across the country doubting who Tunsil was as a person, rather than a football player. He proved the media wrong and has so far netted over $140 million during his NFL career. 

This article was published anonymously and written by a comper of the “Harvard Independent.”