--- title: Laremy Tunsil Draft Hack: What We Learned description: The newest Miami Dolphin learned an unpleasant lesson during his conspicuous draft slide. canonical: https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/ author: Jack Dickey article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-29T04:46:12.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:42.124Z article:section: Ideas og:title: What We Learned From Laremy Tunsil's Dark Draft Night og:description: The newest Miami Dolphin learned an unpleasant lesson during his conspicuous draft slide og:url: https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6b21da62e8e3c6b3/69889127cf40a84051c4308f/rtx2c4em.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4788 og:image:height: 2693 og:image:alt: NFL: 2016 NFL Draft og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What We Learned From Laremy Tunsil's Dark Draft Night twitter:description: The newest Miami Dolphin learned an unpleasant lesson during his conspicuous draft slide twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6b21da62e8e3c6b3/69889127cf40a84051c4308f/rtx2c4em.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Laremy Tunsil's Dark Draft Night > Sponsored content. 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This fall, Thursday Night Football is coming to a smartphone near you._  by [Jack Dickey](https://time.com/author/jack-dickey/)  ## Jack Dickey Apr 29, 2016 4:46 AM UTC  Laremy Tunsil is selected by the Miami Dolphins in the first round of the 2016 NFL Draft in Chicago, IL, on Apr 28, 2016. Laremy Tunsil is selected by the Miami Dolphins in the first round of the 2016 NFL Draft in Chicago, IL, on Apr 28, 2016. Kamil Krzaczynski-—USA Today Sports/Reuters  by [Jack Dickey](https://time.com/author/jack-dickey/)  ## Jack Dickey Apr 29, 2016 4:46 AM UTC The appeal of watching the NFL draft live on television, as far as there is any appeal to speak of, is the sweet, inconsequential taste of manufactured drama. Which players are rising? Which are falling? Whose dreams have come true? Whose dreams have been crushed? The actual football analysis offered on telecasts like Thursday night’s, on the other hand, tends to have limited use. After all, it’s hard to know months before training camp which college players will make much of a professional impact; there is always dissension among the draftniks and so much that is unpredictable besides. Even so, the people who every year try to make sense of the slew of NFL prospects had before this draft reached considerable agreement on Ole Miss offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil. ESPN’s draft experts, Mel Kiper and Todd McShay, ranked him No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, among the whole field. Mike Mayock of the NFL Network ranked him third. The six-foot-five, 310-lb. 21-year-old projected as the best at his position. He was expected to be selected within the first five or six picks. But bizarre online happenings undid that possibility and gave the evening new and unforeseen stakes. Thirteen minutes before the 8 p.m. start time, Tunsil’s own Twitter account [sent out a 30-second video](http://deadspin.com/laremy-tunsil-s-account-tweets-out-gas-mask-smoking-vid-1773721598) of someone smoking a substance from a bong by way of a gas mask then coughing. (Tunsil would admit later in the evening that he was the man in the video.) The tweet would be quickly deleted, and Tunsil’s account with it, but the video had made its way around the web and around team front offices. And Tunsil, like so many lonely green-room prospects from prior years, began to slide. Connected reporters suggested that the video [had scared teams off](https://twitter.com/AKinkhabwala/status/725853006894223361); both the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans took other offensive tackles, rated less highly than Tunsil, and the tackle-needy New York Giants passed him up for a cornerback. Tunsil’s powerful agent, Jimmy Sexton, was said to be calling teams around the league, insisting that the video depicted his client’s uncharacteristic lapse in judgment. His college coach, Hugh Freeze, defended him live on ESPN. Meanwhile the network showed Tunsil about to cry. His fall likely cost him on the order of $10 million over the life of his first contract. Putting a seeming end to the chaos, the Miami Dolphins picked Tunsil at No. 13\. But things somehow managed to get stranger from there. Tunsil’s Instagram account posted [screenshots of text messages](http://deadspin.com/now-laremy-tunsils-instagram-has-posted-alleged-convers-1773740002) purportedly between Tunsil and an Ole Miss athletic department staffer in which Tunsil asked for rent money. Paying players — which Freeze has in the past denied doing — runs afoul of NCAA rules. When reporters asked Tunsil after he had been picked if he had taken money from his coach, he denied it at first. Then, reconsidering, he said, “I’d have to say yeah.” Could even [Taylor Branch](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/) have scripted a more cathartic evening? Tunsil’s social-media tormentor had taken a shotgun to two myths central to maintaining the college-sports cartel. _Of course_ major college football players are not amateurs playing just for the love of the game and its — ha! — pedagogical benefits. And _of course_ college football players smoke pot (assuming that’s what was depicted in the video); not only are they prone like any college students to such indulgences, but they are also football players, apt to self-medicate and, as author and former NFLer Nate Jackson [has argued](http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/%5F/id/12423177/former-player-nate-jackson-calls-nfl-allow-marijuana), perhaps better off doing so with marijuana than with opiates. (The NFL has [a funny relationship](http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2486218-banned-but-bountiful-marijuana-coveted-by-nfl-players-as-invaluable-painkiller) with marijuana, banning it but testing for it only during the offseason, recognizing perhaps that its use is too widespread — or benign — to thwart.) Yet for all the satisfaction one can derive from watching an egg land squarely on the smug visage of big-time college sports, Thursday night’s proceedings had a darker human side. Someone close to Tunsil had betrayed him on the biggest night of his life. (Tunsil’s stepfather, who had been involved in a domestic dispute with the player last June and filed a suit against him on Wednesday, [has denied being that someone](http://www.tmz.com/2016/04/28/laremy-tunsil-stepfather-denies-leaking-bong-video-wasnt-me/).) And having seen Tunsil nearly broken by the first ploy, the saboteur took a second swing during a moment of comparable vulnerability. He seemed, all things considered, to [handle it fairly well.](http://screengrabber.deadspin.com/heres-the-moment-laremy-tunsil-learned-his-instagram-ha-1773742956) But the opportunistic smearing of Laremy Tunsil is nonetheless ugly and sad, and decidedly too consequential for this most frivolous of NFL nights. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/"},"headline":"Laremy Tunsil's Dark Draft Night","datePublished":"2016-04-29T04:46:12.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:42.124Z","description":"The newest Miami Dolphin learned an unpleasant lesson during his conspicuous draft slide","url":"https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/","keywords":["Football","NFL","Hack"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6b21da62e8e3c6b3/69889127cf40a84051c4308f/rtx2c4em.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jack Dickey","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/jack-dickey/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6b21da62e8e3c6b3/69889127cf40a84051c4308f/rtx2c4em.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"NFL: 2016 NFL Draft","caption":"NFL: 2016 NFL Draft","creditText":"Kamil Krzaczynski-—USA Today Sports/Reuters","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/football/","name":"Football"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/","name":"Laremy Tunsil's Dark Draft Night"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Twitter to Stream Thursday Night Football","description":"This fall, Thursday Night Football is coming to a smartphone near you.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/I88gZ0rl/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-04-05T18:52:15.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/I88gZ0rl.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/","duration":"PT53S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4312000/laremy-tunsil-draft-hack/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```