Sunday’s news that former Texas defensive tackle T’Vondre Sweat was arrested for DWI raises plenty of questions. It will be incumbent on any team that is interested in Sweat to seek answers to those questions — and to hope those answers can be trusted.
For starters, how and why was Sweat allegedly driving drunk at 2:00 in the afternoon on a Sunday? Any team thinking about drafting Sweat needs to know the full explanation for that.
Also, they need to know how much alcohol he consumed. We’ve all seen the BAC chart, which shows the intersection between body weight and number of drinks. The more someone weighs, the more booze it takes to get them to the legal limit of 0.08 percent.
Sweat weighs 366 pounds. To get to 0.08 percent BAC, that’s a lot of alcohol. How much will he admit to drinking? And if he tries to say he just had a couple of beers, it’s safe to assume he’s not telling the truth.
The more important assessment to make on Sweat is whether he has learned his lesson or whether he might do it again. How can a team justify bringing to its community someone who might drink excessive alcohol (especially given his body weight) and then drive a car?
After the Packers signed receiver Koren Robinson, who blew his second chance in Minnesota by driving both drunk and really fast as he tried to avoid cops, a reporter asked then-G.M. Ted Thompson a very pointed but appropriate question: “Ted, what if he kills somebody in this state? Driving drunk or speeding away from cops?”
Whoever drafts Sweat needs to be confident that he won’t literally kill someone by driving drunk. It’s a fair concern. To the extent that NFL teams accept public money and public support while engaging in an inherently public enterprise, there’s a responsibility to not endanger the public.
And Sweat can only blame himself for getting behind the wheel while drinking enough to allegedly get a guy his size over the legal limit, especially when he’s only 18, 19, or 20 days away from being drafted.