And because this is the NFL draft, and because every team is seeking a reason not to pick someone, Tunsil slid down the draft board, all the way to the Miami Dolphins at number 13. The bottom line is, somebody appeared to sabotage Tunsil – his Instagram account was also compromised – for whatever reason somebody decided that if they had pieces of “evidence,” they might as well post them at the worst possible time. (If it had been a more violent video, given the rampant inconsistency of the NFL’s reactions to such incidents, who the hell knows?) But you know what? It probably would have, because the NFL is a massive corporate engine that isn’t willing to acknowledge the notion that marijuana is now legal in several states, and I imagine if Tunsil had been slugging from a beer bong the Tennessee Titans wouldn’t have given much of a shit at all and might have snapped him up with the eighth pick. And I know that there are legitimate questions about Tunsil’s background and family history and how that might affect his focus, and I know that perhaps if he didn’t already have those things in his background, this video might not have landed with the same impact. There are so many questions here, obviously, because even if this was Tunsil in the video, I can’t imagine that he was dumb enough to post it himself.

At the very least, he stole the spotlight away from Ezekiel Elliott’s crop top. Laremy Tunsil, for reasons unknown, just happened to stumble into the vortex of all that. Both are based almost entirely on fleeting impressions, on groupthink, on the tyranny of snap judgments and on the notion that any piece of negative information is potentially deterministic. Was this the weirdest moment in modern NFL draft history? Was this one of the strangest moments in the entire shadowy history of Twitter, at least as it relates to professional sports? I think it was, and I think it was because it combined two of the most capricious American pastimes you can imagine: Social media, and the draft itself. It felt like the plot of either a low-grade teen-horror movie or a scene from a Richard Linklater film: Roughly 10 minutes before the 2016 NFL Draft, on the Twitter account of an offensive line prospect named Laremy Tunsil, a video appeared of a young man in a gas mask who looked a lot like Tunsil, and also happened to be inhaling a prodigious bong hit.

Nfl draft gas mask bong