Ohio State football: The assault on Justin Fields

The former Ohio State football player has been falling on Draft boards. Why?

A few weeks ago Dan Orlovsky, one of ESPN’s NFL insider-types, said he’d been told some things that questioned the character and work ethic of Justin Fields. Yesterday, Ian Rappaport of NFL.com broke the news of Fields sharing his epileptic condition with teams during the draft process. This is private medical information that isn’t for public consumption. I fully expect there to be one more Fields bombshell to find its way to another media member before the first round of the draft begins in exactly one week. Make no mistake, Justin Fields is under assault.

Each year leading up to the draft there are rumors about one player or another. They usually die off quickly or don’t seem to have much of an effect on where the player is taken. But, I haven’t seen anything like this since 1983 when drug-use rumors about Dan Marino were rampant. In that draft Marino slipped all the way to 27th before he was taken by the Dolphins. Steelers’ coach Chuck Noll said they passed on him because of those rumors. It still isn’t known who started them. Some felt it came from the NFL itself, others felt a team got it rolling. Marino’s agent even suggested gamblers put it out there.

In the case of Fields we first heard he didn’t put in enough time, and was the last one into the locker room and the first one out. We also heard claims he didn’t treat his teammates at Georgia very well. Considering the amount of media attention the Ohio State program is subjected to, if these assertions were true, we’d have heard something well before this.

Then came the leaked medical information yesterday. Private information Fields shared with NFL teams. That point can’t be stressed enough. His private health details were made public. There is something very slimy and wrong about it. Fields’ dealing with epilepsy is obviously true, but the other claims have no basis.

How did all of this come about? My guess is there is a team who wants Fields to tumble in the first round. They either don’t want to pay a high price to trade up to get him or they hope he falls all the way to that particular team. It could be a team who is sitting at eight or ninth in the first round. It could be one who is around 15th or even lower. Pure speculation on my part, but when private medical information begins leaking out, I can’t help but think it came from one of the teams to whom it was given by Fields.

Justin Fields doesn’t deserve this. There isn’t a player out there who deserves this. The families of these players most certainly don’t deserve to see their son’s reputation dragged through the mud or their medical histories made public knowledge.

Some will say the NFL needs to do something to teams who partake in these misinformation campaigns. I’ll respond to that by saying the NFL doesn’t care. The league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, could care less. He’s interested in what keeps his league at the top of the sports news. This kind of thing leading into the draft is doing just the trick. The league does not care.

So, what is the silver lining in all of this? There is obviously at least one team that sees Fields as a franchise quarterback and are desperate to have him. Despite all of the claims about his throwing mechanics and difficulty reading defenses, someone firmly believes he is going to be a great one.

This is something Buckeye fans already know.