Could Robert Nkemdiche’s fall(s) become the best thing to happen to the Seattle Seahawks in this draft?
Nkemdiche was thought by many to be on his way to becoming a top-five pick in the NFL draft that begins Thursday in Chicago. Then in December the ultra-talented defensive lineman from Mississippi fell out of a fourth-floor window from a hotel room in Atlanta while with teammates.
“I was drunk,” Nkemdiche said, flatly, at the league’s scouting combine in Indianapolis in February.
That fall started two others: His plummet from a top pick to perhaps the bottom or even out of the first round of the draft; and the one he says no one else in that hotel room with him was willing to take when he got cited for marijuana possession as part of the same incident.
Asked about the inconsistency between him saying he was drunk and being cited by the police for possession of marijuana, Nkemdiche said: “There were more people in my room. The hotel was under my name. Nobody wanted to take the fall. It had to go under my name. It just happened to play out like that.”
He said one of the people in the room that night was Laremy Tunsil. His Ole Miss teammate is considered the best offensive tackle in this draft and a likely top-five pick.
“It was a rash decision by me,” Nkemdiche said. “Uncharacteristic. That’s not who I am. That’s not what I stand for. That’s not what my family stands for. It was embarrassing for me and my whole family, the Ole Miss family.”
The Seahawks and many other teams are weighing right now his decision in that hotel room weeks before the biggest job interviews of his life began against the facts he is 6 feet 3, 293 pounds with a sculpted physique and freakish athleticism. Nkemdiche has been deemed NFL-ready almost since he arrived at Ole Miss in 2013 as the top defensive-lineman recruit in college football.
But his production in the SEC never matched his apparent physical skills, or his hype. Last season he had just 21/2 sacks for a team that won Mississippi’s first Sugar Bowl since 1970. Nkemdiche was suspended from that Jan. 2 game because of his arrest for marijuana possession.
He also spoke candidly at the combine how “there are times I didn’t finish. I was lazy on some plays at times.”
General manager John Schneider and head coach Pete Carroll have made so-called “red-flag“ players their first pick twice in their first six years running the Seahawks — in which Seattle went to two Super Bowls, won the franchise’s first NFL title and has go to the playoffs four straight seasons.
In 2012 Seattle selected pass rusher Bruce Irvin 15th overall five years after he’d been arrested for breaking into a drug dealer’s house and spending two weeks incarcerated.
Last year the Seahawks unexpectedly used their first pick, in the second round, on defensive end Frank Clark. He had obvious skills as a fast pass rusher. But he’d been kicked out of his college program at Michigan in November 2014 following an arrest and brief jailing on suspicion of domestic violence, plus a case when he was a freshman of stealing a laptop computer from a dorm room.
In each case, Schneider and Carroll said they did extra investigating and interviewing to get to thoroughly know each player and each story.
“We want these guys coming in with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove,” Carroll said.
Noah Spence is another mega-skilled defensive end with “red flags” that may — or not — keep him out of the first round. He failed two drug tests, got treatment for Ecstasy addiction and got kicked out of Big Ten football. He transferred from Ohio State to Eastern Kentucky.
How Seattle views Nkemdiche and Spence is different than how many other teams — or people, in general — do.
“Different general managers have different philosophies,” ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay said last week during a teleconference. “At the end of the day, do you trust him? I think that’s really the whole thing with Robert Nkemdiche. And my answer is no, I don’t.
“And we can get into all the reasons, but you’re asking me my opinion. I have to hit on a first-round pick. You look over the history of the draft, and organizations that continually build through the draft and have success, they don’t miss on very many first-round picks. So you have to go into it with the mentality that you’re going to hit.
“And yes, it’s enticing. And I certainly think there are some teams — you look at Seattle late in the first, Arizona late in the first, they’re teams that, traditionally, have taken chances on guys that have some character baggage and backgrounds. And if they wind up doing it, who knows? You can hit.
“But I think there’s enough risk there that I would want to wait, probably, at least until the second round before I drafted him and, in all likelihood, I’m putting him in a position on my board where I’m pretty sure he’s not going to be available.”
That sounds like what the Lions are doing. Last week Lions general manager Bob Quinn told the Detroit Free Press Nkemdiche is indeed a “red flag.”
“If they have a red flag — and that’s not what we use on our draft card, that’s just a generic term that we spoke about, I think it was at the combine,” Quinn said, “that’s just things that we have to consider the value of the player compared to the risk involved in taking him. So it’s not like these guys are off the board. You just got to manage the risk and the reward of taking a guy like that.
“That’s really one of the last things that we do in our process, is eliminating guys from the board for those off-the-field concerns. So we’re actually having meetings about that in the next couple of days. … There will be a fair number of guys that we will not consider for character concerns and off-the-field reasons.”
Nkemdiche will be spending this week into Thursday’s first round sweating which teams think that way about him, which don’t — and how much money and opportunity he may have cost himself with his decisions off the field.
“I’ve just got to wait and see,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can to make teams believe me and believe the person I truly am. I made a mistake as a 21-year old. I’ve just got to keep moving forward and hopefully they believe me and I can do what I have to do on Sunday to make them see my athleticism.”
Multiple times under Schneider and Carroll, such drive back from personal adversity has convinced the Seahawks when they’ve considered top “red-flag” prospects.
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