Lions GM Says ‘Half the Board Would Be Gone’ If Pot Disqualified Players from NFL Draft

The general manager of the Detroit Lions says that if teams disqualified players who smoked pot from draft consideration then half of first-round picks would not have heard their names called last night.

“If we took players off the board because they smoked pot in college or marijuana,” Lions GM Bob Quinn told ESPN, “like half the board would be gone. Realistically, that’s the day and age we live in, and you have to evaluate the risk and the rewards of the player.”

The comment comes in the wake of Ole Miss offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil dropping to the Miami Dolphins at the thirteenth pick last night after a video of him smoking a substance out of a gas-mask bowl mysteriously surfaced immediately before the draft. That concern quickly morphed into other character concerns as more tweets arose on his apparently-hacked account detailing Tunsil soliciting money from Ole Miss officials as a student-athlete.

Tunsil matter-of-factly owned up to both infractions. “I made that mistake several years ago,” he admitted of the bizarre gas-mask video. The “mistake” proved costly, as Tunsil likely lost millions of dollars because of it. Teams remain skittish over pot smokers in part because of the league meting out suspensions to habitual users.

Despite the perceived popularity of pot, not a single player at the NFL Combine failed the drug test administered there.