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Laremy Tunsil's Wild Night

Laremy Tunsil had a rough night last night because someone hacked his social media accounts.

Laremy Tunsil had probably the worst night of his life last night and not because he was drafted No. 13 overall by the Dolphins. Minutes before the draft kicked off, his Twitter account posted a video of Tunsil smoking weed out of a bong attached to a gas mask. Shortly after that, his instagram posted screenshots of a text conversation with his coach referencing potential impermissible benefits he received at Ole Miss. Both were deleted quickly, but that obviously doesn't matter—the damage was done. Not long ago, Tunsil was considered the top pick of this draft and he sank all the way to Miami at 13.

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Still up on Tunsil's Instagram pic.twitter.com/lLzR8PurJr
— Bill Reiter (@sportsreiter) April 29, 2016

It's funny, how scary these things are to NFL teams, and if you watch that ESPN clip up above you get a feel for why. Teams can be picky, because there are only 32 of them, and there will always be someone else. So if you mess up—depending on a team's definition of "mess up"—they'll just go on to the next one. Or pick you later when the cost isn't so high (even though the cost is never really high because these are fake contracts to begin with). Louis Riddick put it best: teams are performing a calculus on a player's worthiness of being picked. They evaluate the football elements, and then factor in all the other stuff and quietly chip away at the player because ultimately it is the pick that has value, not the person they use it on.

After Tunsil's awful night got going, his stepfather, who just sued him, denied posting the video and images to the social media accounts, saying, "I was a Red Cross volunteer of the year. I would never do anything like this." Whether it was his stepfather, or someone else, it seems clear that Tunsil was quite possibly the first person in history to have actually been hacked when damaging material wound up on his social media accounts.

It's not all bad, though. We got to hear Ian Rapoport say "taking a bong hit with a gas mask" on NFL Network and Jon Gruden almost lost his mind talking about social media. But the real lesson is just how completely unstoppable the NFL is. Even in a draft—a draft— when the first two picks were locked up, a draft without any intrigue or no-doubt stars, the NFL is still going to dominate the rest of the week and weekend.

[ESPN]