Dalvin Cook’s NFL draft slide might be influenced by ‘unverified rumors’

Every year I look up at the NFL draft board after the first round, assess the damage, and realize there’s one name that surprisingly isn’t on there. This year, that name is Dalvin Cook.

Cook fell to the Vikings, who traded up in the second round to the 41st pick to take him.

As a college fan, I get picking Leonard Fournette as high as he went. Christian McCaffrey to the Panthers over Cook seems a little weird, although their numbers were right about the same, with the Stanford product playing fewer games due to injury.

Still, most mock drafts heavily favored Cook to go in the first round, and our Dan Kadar ranked him as the best offensive player in the entire class. He’s renowned for his top-end speed and ability to shift out of cuts without losing any speed. He comes with some power as well.

Yet, you can’t help but wonder if teams got spooked by bad information

This piece, written by the MMQB’s Robert Klemko, details that a young Cook had transgressions. As a teenager, he was arrested twice, with charges dropped each time. At FSU, he got in trouble for a BB gun incident, a run-in with animal services regarding mistreatment of puppies, and an incident in which someone brandished a firearm in his apartment. He was also found not guilty of punching a woman outside of a Tallahassee bar.

It’s also not uncommon for players to be drafted in spite of character concerns. The Raiders drafted a cornerback at 19 who is the midst of an ongoing sexual assault investigation. Joe Mixon, a running back like Cook, was not picked yet, ostensibly because of character issues. Mixon was caught on camera punching a woman.

But the waters surrounding Cook are much murkier, and they go beyond things he did himself. Per MMQB, it appears someone is out to get him:

The MMQB spoke with representatives from nine NFL teams on the topic of Cook, and two scouts independently cited the same man as the source of several unverified Cook rumors. This man isn’t a certified agent, but a “runner,” a sort of industry free agent who helps certified agents recruit players during the draft process.

Villani says he swore off engaging in any business dealings with this runner years ago when he stiffed XPE on a client’s bill. A scout familiar with the runner suggested he might have had an informal business relationship with Cook before the prospect settled on different representation, though when told the runner’s name, Cook said he’d never heard of him.

But would those “unverified” rumors have any bearing on Cook’s draft status?

I don’t think you can out and out say they didn’t. If a team was on the fence about Cook, it had an out not to take him, even if it was bad information from someone with unscrupulous goals.

In the article, Cook bucked trends during the draft process and apparently didn’t interview well with at least one team (which isn’t a surprise, given that he’s a reserved guy). Other teams referenced a repeated pattern of bad behavior. And again, Cook is on record as having skeletons in his closet.

But if Cook isn’t being given room to grow because someone’s lying about more character slipups than he actually had, that’s a bigger problem. And it wipes away any work Cook can do to better himself and show maturation. That rope’s already shorter than it otherwise would be, given that Cook is a black man.

The profile was pitched to the world by the MMQB’s Peter King like this:

King’s one of the more prominent NFL writers, and his words carry weight. To think there weren’t at least some execs who shied away from Cook because of the rumors referenced in that article is a misunderstanding of the precarious nature of a player’s draft status. Anonymous NFL Scout or Random Shady Agent Runner can tank that via something as silly as hand size, which Teddy Bridgewater found out a couple of years ago.

Cook should be selected early in the second round, and at least he’s with family at home in Miami and not in Philadelphia at the draft. But Cook missed out on millions last night when he wasn’t selected.

We likely will never know the real reason why he wasn’t, but it’s hard to imagine part of the fall wasn’t related to these rumors.