Robert Nkemdiche, Noah Spence look to clear character questions at NFL combine

INDIANAPOLIS — During the NFL combine, teams are allowed 60 15-minute interviews with college prospects, which many front office executives and coaches regard as the most critical component of the evaluation process.

Those precious 15 minutes help a team identify a player’s character and gauge whether he would be a good fit in the locker room. For a player with a checkered past, these meetings take on grave significance. Those with so-called “red flags” can prove they are worth the risk, that they learned from their mistakes and won’t intoxicate a team’s chemistry.

Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager and current ESPN analyst Mark Dominik, who joked that these meetings are akin to speed-dating, said that when he would conduct such interviews, the difficult part is gauging the sincerity of the player’s answers.

“You try to gauge the genuineness of his answers,” Dominik said. “You know how you just get a vibe from somebody? You’re not trying to beat them down. The goal is just to get to know them and say, ’Can I put them in my locker room and will he be OK? Will he be the pied piper and people are going to want to follow him around or is he going to be a leader.’”

Perhaps no other prospect at the combine has more to prove than Robert Nkemdiche. The former Ole Miss defensive tackle was suspended for the Sugar Bowl game after he was charged with marijuana possession stemming from a December incident in Atlanta. Nkemdiche, who was the consensus top high school player of the 2013 recruiting class, fell from the fourth floor of an Atlanta hotel and police found marijuana cigarettes in his hotel room. 

Nkemdiche, who recorded 98 tackles and seven sacks in 35 career games, announced he would forgo his senior season and declared for the NFL draft shortly after the incident.

Speaking on Friday at the combine, Nkemdiche was candid about the incident and how he has addressed it with teams, including the Washington Redskins — the only team he has formally met with, though he has additional interviews scheduled for Friday evening.

“I tell them the truth,” Nkemdiche said. “It was a rash decision by me. Uncharacteristic. That’s not who I am. That’s not what I stand for. That’s not what my family stands for. It was embarrassing for me and my whole family, the Ole Miss family. I tell them that’s not the kind of player they’re getting. They’re getting a straight-forward player. I’m never going to return to that. I’m just moving forward and embracing this moment.

“They believe me. It’s the truth and it’s what I’m going to keep moving forward with. I’m going to stick to my story. That’s what it is. I’m going to keep moving forward, keep being in the moment and get ready to show out on Sunday.”

According to Nkemdiche, he was drunk, not under the influence of marijuana, when he fell from the Atlanta hotel. When asked why he was the one charged with possession of marijuana, he said several others were in his room, including Ole Miss left tackle Laremy Tunsil, one of this year’s top draft prospects. Tunsil was suspended for seven games last season when the NCAA determined he received impermissible benefits, but he was not charged in this incident. 

“There were more people in my room,” Nkemdiche said. “The hotel was under my name. Nobody wanted to take the fall. It had to go under my name. It just happened to play out like that.”

Nkemdiche is considered by talent evaluators as an exceptional talent and it remains uncertain where he will be drafted. He was recently linked to the Redskins in a mock draft, though his stock can change greatly given how he is perceived in these interviews. Nkemdiche has also been criticized for an inconsistent effort on the field, something he admitted to on Friday.

“If you look at Robert Nkemdiche in a vacuum andJust watch his Alabama tape against the best team in college football, he was dominant,” NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock said. “Off that one tape, if he didn’t have any off-the-field issues and if he’d played that hard every week, we’d be talking about him as the first pick in this draft. That’s how talented he is, and that’s how much upside he has.

“However, once you factor in the inconsistency from snap to snap and game to game and the off-the-field situation, then you get into, how do you measure this kid? At what point does the risk justify the reward?”

Like Nkemdiche, Eastern Kentucky defensive end Noah Spence has endured similar questions this week and was also transparent about his past. By Friday afternoon, he said he had met with the Redskins, New York Giants, Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens.

At Ohio State, Spence tested positive for ecstasy and was suspended ahead of the Orange Bowl in 2014, as well as the first two games of the next season. He failed another drug test during that summer and was indefinitely suspended by the Big Ten.

Spence had 11.5 sacks and 63 tackles in 11 games at Eastern Kentucky and impressed at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama in January. Spence, who is ranked as the fourth-best defensive end and projects to be a first-round pick, said that he has since tightened his circle of friends and has mostly stopped partying.

“Every time I did [ecstasy], it was me going out and partying,” Spence said. “I spend a lot more time by myself. I got a girlfriend now, we chill, go to the movies. I don’t do much partying nowadays.”

Both Spence and Nkemdiche handled their press conferences gracefully and appeared to have improved their behavior. The challenge now is convincing NFL teams of the same.