Former Ole Miss tackle Laremy Tunsil had his twitter and instagram accounts hacked before or during last night’s NFL draft.  “My account was hacked” is the standard excuse for doing something stupid on social media, but Tunsil may actually be the victim of the hacking.  It defies logic to think that he would knowingly and purposefully put out pictures of himself smoking weed on draft night.  No one would think that would be a good idea, even a college kid in the midst of a lapse of judgment.

The weed wasn’t the big story.  Tunsil answered some questions from the media.  In answering those questions he confirmed the validity of some texts that also appeared on his social media.  Those texts implied he as getting paid during college by some assistants. He then confirmed.  Here is the video from A2Dradio.com:

Some quick thoughts on this.

1.  See, everyone gets paid.  There are some people who are convinced that the entire college football system is corrupt.  They will take last night’s admission that Tunsil received cash as proof that the whole system is corrupt.  I’m not sure you can infer all of that, but I don’t think any of us are surprised.  Things like this happen and not just at your rival’s school.  They happen everywhere.  I refer you back to Steven Godfrey’s piece on how recruits get paid.  Which brings me to my second point…
2. This is sad.  Did you see what he was getting money for?  Here’s part of the exchange:

Tunsil wants money to pay his mother’s bills.  We can parse this if we want and ask if all of that $305 was needed for the bills or if $305 is too much for a power bill.  We can question whether it was just one month or multiple months.  We can wonder how many times this happened.  We may not get the answers to those questions.  Whatever we may think of Ole Miss, the SEC, paying players, cheating and the rest.  Holding those considerations aside, here is what we just saw.

We saw a mother who couldn’t pay her power bill.  We saw a son who couldn’t pay either and was asking for money to help.  Forget everything else about major college football and what we all want to happen on Saturdays.  This is real life.  These are real people with real problems.  Adjudge it anyway you want, but remember there appears to be real issues here, much bigger than a game.

3.  The Tunsil family is in the clear now.  This story has a happy ending.  Laramy Tunsil now has enough money to pay for his family’s power bills forever if he does it right.  Things like this will, hopefully, only be part of the past.  Things are getting better for them.  On the other hand…

4. It’s been a bad week for Ole Miss.  Three first round draft picks are the makings of a good day.  This weeks should have been a celebration for the Rebels, instead its been bad and worse news.  First satellite camps were ok’ed by the NCAA meaning more competition for recruits.  Then the Tunsil news came out, and while we can look compassionately on the individuals involved, there is no doubt this is clearly impermissible under NCAA rules. Ole Miss was already dealing with an NCAA investigation.  I’m guessing this won’t help.