Janoris Jenkins: "Where In The Book Does It Say You Can't Have Kids?"

Janoris Jenkins is this year's "guy who's really good, but had some trouble so he'll scare off some prude GMs and likely be a big bargain for whoever takes him." He's been tased, he's been in a couple fights, he's got a couple busts for weed, and all of these things are potentially problematic—things that could take him off an NFL field. But he's also got four kids with three women, and somewhere along the way NFL GMs decided that could be a warning flag.

Jenkins doesn't see it that way:

"It's weird because I had those kids while I was playing college football and it didn't affect me not once," said Jenkins, who is from Pahokee. "I'm proud to have my four kids. If they want to throw that in my face, so be it.

"Everybody has kids. Where in the book do it say you can't have kids? It doesn't say that in the law. I'm a great father. I'm there whenever they need me."

(A note on grammar, and "where do [sic] it say." There are two schools of thought when transcribing quotes. One says clean up minor grammatical errors for readability. The other says quotes are sacrosanct and should never be altered, even if it makes the subject come across as uneducated. The Palm Beach Post apparently subscribes to the latter, though you'll never see them including the "uhhs" and "errs" that pepper normal human speech.)

We made this clear last week, but it bears repeating: don't believe anything you hear from anonymous scouts before the draft. Teams have one motive and one motive alone for public sharing opinions on prospects: to trash the guys they like and try to scare other teams off. If a team tells you they're worried about Janoris Jenkins's babies, they're saying other teams should be worried about Janoris Jenkins's babies. Everyone gets mad when the Steelers and Ravens make the playoffs and still land impact players in the draft. Well, this is why it happens—the teams in the middle of the first round are going to pass on Jenkins solely because he's not good at birth control. And that's a major reason those teams tend to pick in the middle of the first round every year.