Former Top HS Recruit Robert Nkemdiche Getting Overlooked as NFL Draft's Top DL

Robert Nkemdiche fell out of an Atlanta hotel room window in December. The incident resulted in a marijuana possession arrest for Nkemdiche after the substance was found in the room he dropped from, leading to his bowl game suspension by the University of Mississippi. With one foot out the door, the defensive tackle decided to declare for the NFL draft immediately, instead of waiting the extra month for formality's sake like the other underclassmen in the class.

That one episode changed Nkemdiche's draft stock drastically, or at least the perception of it in the media. Before, the three-year starter was looked at as a top-five lock. For example, Eddie Brown of the San Diego Union-Tribune had mocked the former Rebel as the second overall pick on November 11. Now it's hard to even find analysts discussing the prospect.

As of now, when you click NFL.com's Mock Draft Central, the first projection that pops up is by Daniel Jeremiah, a former NFL scout. Jeremiah doesn't have Nkemdiche in his first-round mock.

Obviously, getting arrested and falling 15 feet isn't ideal, but is it enough of a concern to take a player from elite status to slipping out of the first round altogether? The fascinating part is that he isn't the only talented player with decent-sized off-field concerns in this draft class. There are three who come to mind in first-round projections.

• Laremy Tunsil, OT, Mississippi: Nkemdiche's teammate also has some history. At the combine, Nkemdiche, who shares an agency with Tunsil, stated that the bookend was in the hotel room that the defensive tackle fell out of. Tunsil was also arrested last offseason after punching his stepfather, who allegedly pushed his mother. To lesser concern, Tunsil was suspended for the first half of Mississippi's season for receiving improper benefits.
• Noah Spence, EDGE, Eastern Kentucky: Unlike Nkemdiche, Spence was actually suspended for failing a drug test, as he received a three-gamer which began in his sophomore season. While suspended, Spence failed another drug test. He told Fox Sports' Bruce Feldman it was due to ecstasy, which resulted in a league suspension by the Big Ten, forcing him to transfer to Eastern Kentucky in the FCS. Last May, after enrolling at Eastern Kentucky, but before even seeing the field, Spence was arrested for alcohol intoxication in a public place and second-degree disorderly conduct.
• Joey Bosa, EDGE, Ohio State: Bosa was suspended to start the 2015 season, along with several teammates. According to Joe Schad of ESPN, the four suspensions that Ohio State laid out for its players were either grade- or marijuana-related. In March, Charlie Campbell of WalterFootball.com reported that Bosa was a player that NFL teams suspected of ecstasy use, like his former teammate Noah Spence. He also stated that Bosa told NFL staffs that his 2015 suspension came from electing to not take an offseason drug test.

Jeremiah has mocked Tunsil as high as first overall, Bosa as high as fourth overall and Spence as high as 10th overall since February. In the five mock drafts that Jeremiah has posted since February, Nkemdiche was only mocked in the first round twice, once as the 21st overall pick and the other as the 28th overall pick. The latter was the final of the two Nkemdiche first-round projections, published on March 1. There have been three Jeremiah mocks published in the month and a half since then, none of which include Nkemdiche.

In those mocks, Jeremiah described Nkemdiche as a "top-5 pick talent" and "one of the most talented defenders in the draft." My only question is why Tunsil, Spence and Bosa aren't taking the same type of tumble as Nkemdiche if their talents are equal. If his issues stem around marijuana usage, Tunsil was allegedly around the drug, too, and Spence and Bosa have either admitted to or have been accused of using amphetamines.

One knock that has come Nkemdiche's way is that he's too close to his brother, Denzel, who has been hospitalized twice since late November and was Robert's teammate at Mississippi. The circumstances of the older Nkemdiche's hospitalizations still aren't known, but the second trip came after the younger brother's hotel incident, so some took it as another potential drug-related issue in the family. If Nkemdiche is dropping down boards due to guilt by association, shouldn't Tunsil also slip for being in that Atlanta hotel room?

The three previously-mentioned potential first-round prospects have been suspended from regular-season play—Spence having been so twice—which has cost their teams on the field. It's rarely even an angle brought up for Tunsil or Bosa projections.

Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has done a great job over the years of posting the anonymous thoughts of scouts in his extensive predraft pieces. In his 2016 NFL draft outlook, there didn't seem to be anything directly damning of Nkemdiche's character outside of the arrest. The negative words of scouts that McGinn posted were that Nkemdiche was "strange strange" and "buyer beware."

Nkemdiche does seem to be a character. His Twitter handle is @TheLegendMerlin, and his avatar is digital art of a head exploding with light from the eyes up. He plays the saxophone, making him one of the few musician-athlete crossovers. His sack dance looks like some sort of a crossover between yoga and a Dragon Ball Z still shot. None of that seems like anything worth putting on a scouting report, though.

For what it's worth, McGinn listed Nkemdiche in the "probably gone" tier of his article, ranking him as the 12th through 20th overall player on the board based off of "interviews with executives in personnel for five teams." He also defined the "probably gone" tier as players "who appear to have no better than a 50-50 chance of remaining on the board at No. 27," which is the slot in which the Green Bay Packers, who he covers, are slated to pick.

On Play the Draft, a site which takes a stock market approach to tracking the draft, the Mississippi product is ranked as the eighth defensive tackle in the class behind Sheldon Rankins of Louisville, Andrew Billings of Baylor, Jarran Reed of Alabama, Vernon Butler of Louisiana Tech, Chris Jones of Mississippi State, A'Shawn Robinson of Alabama and Kenny Clark of UCLA.

Meanwhile, Tunsil is the top-ranked offensive player, Bosa is the top-ranked defensive lineman and Spence is the top-ranked 3-4 outside linebacker. Nkemdiche is the 40th name on the site's overall big board, just one spot behind Jaylon Smith, the linebacker from Notre Dame who may not be drafted after a postseason knee injury.

The only way you can come to the conclusion that Nkemdiche is going to be drafted below Tunsil, Bosa and Spence, assuming everything reported is true, is if you didn't think Nkemdiche was as talented as the group in the first place. Some have even argued the latter. 

Robert Nkemdiche will be a tricky eval for NFL. Powerful. Runs 4.8. VJ: 34 but limited production & off-field ?s: https://t.co/7GiOj965Py

— Bruce Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB) December 20, 2015

The basis of that argument is production. Despite being the top recruit in the 2013 class, per 247 Sports' composite rankings, he only posted six sacks over three years at Mississippi. It should be noted, though, that athleticism, not production, has always been the standard that college defensive linemen have been judged by.

In Jadeveon Clowney's final season at South Carolina, he only posted three sacks. That was as an edge-defender, a primary pass-rusher, for the Gamecocks. That didn't stop him from being drafted first overall.

Sheldon Richardson, an athletic under tackle like Nkemdiche, was drafted 13th overall after posting four sacks in his final year at Missouri and six sacks over his last two collegiate seasons, both just one tally mark ahead of Nkemdiche in the same amount of time. Richardson went on to win Defensive Rookie of the Year honors, despite his production "woes." He made the Pro Bowl in 2014, his sophomore season in the league, after posting eight sacks, more than in his entire college career and against a higher level of competition.

There's just no excuse to discredit Nkemdiche's film because of production. Not when he's as good of an on-paper athlete as he is. He destroyed offensive linemen off the snap of the ball, and not by guessing the snap count. Per Mock Draftable, a site that is able to give out combine percentiles on individual positions, Nkemdiche finished in the 93rd percentile in the 40-yard dash, the 97th percentile in the vertical jump and the 96th percentile in the broad jump for defensive tackles. He's "twitched up."

As far as athletic comparisons go, there's no active interior defensive linemen who is closer to Richardson athletically as Nkemdiche is, according Mock Draftable. We're talking about a player who is on par with Aaron Donald and Ndamukong Suh athletically, even when adjusting for size. Donald and Suh are the only defensive tackles since 2004 who have posted eight or more sacks during their rookie seasons.

Nkemdiche has bull-rushed SEC bookends with one-arm moves that I'm not sure he even broke a sweat landing. When he's motivated in the ground game, he'll make his way through multiple blockers to stuff a running back.

That seems to be the other major factor: effort. Like Clowney, Nkemdiche was seeing double-teams often in his college career. Isolated one-on-one, he'd make a penetrating play, so teams had to throw two men his way.

The problem for some is how he handled those responsibilities. Nkemdiche on the field played like someone who knew college was just a three-year buffer between high school and the professional level. For someone who was as talented as him coming out of high school, it's hard to tell him he was wrong, though.

After three years of double-teams, it's easy to imagine how a player would at some point decide to conserve his energy and just eat double-team blocks, which open up plays for his other 10 teammates on the field to make. In the NFL, he won't be seeing as many of those looks, which, like for Richardson, may mean he has a significantly better career in the NFL than he did in the SEC.

"

Nkemdiche really did take over in that Alabama game. pic.twitter.com/HeEAALfiZf

— Rob Donaldson (@DraftCharge) March 4, 2016

"

Don't just label Nkemdiche as a combine warrior, though. Whenever his ego was tested, like against Alabama this year when his Rebels upset the eventual national champions for their one loss of 2015, the defensive tackle was beating double-teams, beating zone blocks and he was setting up pass protectors with advanced pass-rushing moves.

When he wants to be, Nkemdiche is the best defensive lineman in the class, even better than Ohio State's Bosa or Oregon's DeForest Buckner. Taking a player with a past can be a gamble, but losing out on that talent can be just as bad.

Warren Sapp, the Hall of Fame defensive tackle, was drafted 12th in the 1995 draft. Prior to draft day, he was projected as a top-two pick, but because of a failed marijuana test, he slipped. This wasn't him accidentally falling out of a window, but him failing a drug test he knew he was going to take in advance, which in some ways can be viewed as deliberate. He only fell to No. 12.

Sapp wound up as the only Hall of Famer taken in the beginning of the 1995 first round. The only other player with such honors drafted in the first two rounds of 1995 was linebacker Derrick Brooks, who got to play with Sapp in Tampa Bay.

There's just something wrong with this picture. Nkemdiche has too many flashes, is too athletic and hasn't been in trouble enough for him to realistically fall out of the first round. He's a known risk, but also a known talent, which matters in a class that is thin in terms of elite prospects.

It's probable that Nkemdiche smoked marijuana in that Atlanta hotel. A year before his arrest, an alleged Snapchat screenshot appeared on college football blogs of Nkemdiche "hitting the bong." How much does that matter in the end, though?

Last year, Scott Fujita, a former 12-year NFL veteran, made the case that the NFL franchises don't care if players use marijuana during their free time; they only worry about passing or failing drug tests, which the league imposes due to the federal status of the drug.

"

"It's about the timing of him getting into trouble," Fujita said on [Jim] Rome's Showtime Sports show. "They (NFL teams) don't care about marijuana. They care about it because it's illegal and a federal law, but that's the only reason they care.

"A coach worries that a guy might get popped one too many times and end up missing games, but I've had coaches tell me they'd rather have you go home at night, smoke a bowl, sit your ass on the couch and play Xbox and eat some Cheetos rather than being out at night drinking and getting in trouble."

"

In a win-now league, it's easy to buy into that line of thinking. If passing drug tests is the issue, Nkemdiche has a leg up on Spence and Bosa, allegedly; though, those two are still being projected to come off the board before the athletic specimen—in Bosa's case usually a round before.

At some point, you have to look at this subject from a cynical perspective. If you were a team drafting outside of the top five, which is when all of the elite prospects of Nkemdiche's upside are going to have their names called, wouldn't you be feeding to the media that the lineman is "strange strange" and "buyer beware"? This is your opportunity to steal an early first-round talent in mid- to late-Day 1, which if you noticed by the recent Los Angeles Rams trade for the first overall pick, can come at the price difference of multiple top-100 at-bats down the line.

Every class, there are players like D.J. Hayden who weren't considered first-round picks until a week or two leading up to the draft, when honesty started to leak out of the league. Less than two weeks before the 2013 draft, Peter King of Sports Illustrated wrote a mock draft that included Hayden as a potential first-round pick by the Cincinnati Bengals.

This was the first time that many had even heard Hayden's name, let alone considered him as an early selection. On the day of the draft, CBS Sports' Jason La Canfora reported that executives believed that Hayden would be picked third overall by the Oakland Raiders, the team which would eventually select him with the 12th pick after trading down.

I wouldn't be shocked if Nkemdiche is "that guy" in the next week or two. Buying into Nkemdiche's narrative relative to the rest of the class would imply that guilt by association only applies to him, that marijuana is a bigger concern than amphetamines to NFL coaches, who are apparently more focused on beating a system than judging drug use, and that production means more for NFL success than athleticism for defensive line prospects, which it never has. Too many trains of thought are running off of the tracks here.

If draft coverage were really one big "stock" game, now would be the time to buy low on Nkemdiche, who has the potential to be the best front seven player in the class, and by this time in two weeks, may have been the first front seven player selected in the 2016 draft.