Florida football: Are the Jachai Polite off-field rumors true?

Florida football’s edge rusher Jachai Polite has seen his draft stock free fall since the combine. Are the rumors surrounding him true?

I want to clear the air of any conflict of interest before I go on any further. Yes, I do live in Gainesville, Fla. No, I am not a Florida Gators fan. Yes, I have gone to Gator games and enjoyed the heck out of them. My interest in Polite is because I’ve seen a lot of him as a local and I initially thought he would be a great pick for my favorite NFL team, the Green Bay Packers.

The aim of this piece is simply to bring more attention to the rumors and give Polite a fair shake instead of slamming him.

I’ll start with where I first heard the rumors. It was many weeks ago by this point, but it was after the college football season was over. I heard on the Stick to Football podcast from Matt Miller that Florida Gators EDGE rusher Jachai Polite had some of those dreaded ‘off the field’ issues surrounding him.

My first reaction was one of astonishment. My second was to immediately ask my best friend, who is a huge Gators fan, what he thought of this. He follows the team much closer than I do and he validated what I had initially thought, which was that rumors were nonsense.

I hadn’t heard a single bad thing about Polite and neither had my friend. We’re far from the authorities that Miller is, but still. Nothing. And if anything, I had heard the exact opposite about Polite. His Twitter handle is @RetireMoms which very clearly states his goal of eventually earning enough money to one day allow his mother to retire. He also had gone through a significant body transformation and changed positions while at Florida, a huge sacrifice and extreme amount of work for a college player. Those are positives in the ‘player character’ areas of scouting reports.

I decided to take to the Twitter machine and try to get to the bottom of this. Fortunately, it was pretty easy. After only a couple of tweets at Miller, I got a response.

Of course, Miller won’t leak everything. If there’s more to it, then we may never know. But scouts that went through UF kept reporting back that Polite was immature. And that’s it.

This basically supports my initial theory, since, as Miller stated, there were never any legal issues surrounding Polite. I was thinking maybe some scouts saw poor body language from Polite and made a note of it. Then when they saw him a second time were more aware of said poor body language and continued to make notes of it.

It doesn’t take a psychology degree to understand that it’s easier to see somebody a certain way if you already have a preconceived perception of them. And I really think that’s what is happening with Polite. It starts with one note on one play about poor hustle or body language, or the scout hears one crude joke and makes a note of it. And just like that Polite is labeled a certain way for every scout after to take further notes of.

Think about it this way. If you’re a scout going to look at a quarterback from a small school and you hear that he has a rocket arm, that will probably be one of the first things you’re looking to validate on your own scouting report. It’s human nature.

This specific clip of Polite pursuing a play down the field sticks out in my mind as something that I think goes against everything I’ve heard about him. At least, it goes against any of the poor body language aspects of my theory. Poor body language, pouting, slumped shoulders, head down, etc. could be seen as immaturity or pure laziness. The guy in that clip is not lazy. The guy in that clip looks like a guy I want on my football team.

One of the more important questions we need to ask ourselves here is: Who cares if he’s immature? Do you know how many great football players are immature? I don’t. His record is clean, he’s got good tape, and he’s a menace to opposing backfields.

Another reason his stock could be falling beside the reports of immaturity is his testing. It’s true, he wasn’t great, but he also said he was injured. If you want to assume the worst and think Polite actually is everything that people have said about him, then you may also agree that he made up his injury to cover for his poor numbers at the combine. But accusing football players of making up injuries is a really dangerous game to play, especially when the larger issue at hand is about how many players apparently cover up injuries so they can continue to play. We’ll see what happens at Polite’s pro day later this month where he has a chance to test again.

Polite’s interviews at the combine were the final straw for many fans. If you read the transcripts, they looked awful. But if you actually see what he had to say about those interviews your mind should be changed almost immediately.

The most important thing to note here was when the reporter asked Polite, “Anything they ask you that  kind of threw you for a loop?” The tone in which Polite said “no” says a lot.

This could be read in one of two ways. One, Polite is oblivious to everything that’s being said about him and he sees no issue with being questioned about immaturity issues. The other, a far more likely scenario, is that Polite understands this game that teams are playing with him. They hear that he’s immature and they want to try to get that out of him and see for themselves. Fair or not, that’s what NFL teams do. But given the way Polite handled these questions it just doesn’t feel like he’s been covered fairly. I think he handled himself well in this specific clip.

To not test great is one thing, which Polite definitely did not do. But to justify his draft stock falling because of that plus his ‘off-field’ issues just isn’t right to me. We may never know what really went down between Polite and the first scout who reported him as being immature. Maybe he is just too childish to be a first-round draft pick, or maybe he just said a joke that some old guy didn’t find very funny and decided to make note of it for other old guys to judge him on.

One more thing to consider in this whole case is something else Matt Miller said on his podcast, this time about Josh Allen from Kentucky. Miller said Allen has shown a great combination of athleticism and production in college, which is a combination that seldom fails in the NFL. Jachai Polite, while not testing as great at the combine, has shown incredible athleticism on film and produced at an extremely high level last year at Florida. If it can be said for one guy, it can be said for the other.

I still think Polite is draftable. I would have loved him at pick 12 for the Packers and I’d love him even more at 30 or 44. I hope he’s able to prove everybody wrong.