In the 2009 season, Hernandez led the Gators in receptions, with sixty-eight for 850 yards and five touchdowns—two of them in the same game, against rival Florida State. In December, he won the Mackey Award, given annually to the best collegiate tight end, along with the All-American and All-Southeastern Conference first-team picks.
After the Gators won the 2010 Sugar Bowl that January, there seemed to be no question that Aaron Hernandez had earned a spot as a first-round pick for the NFL. He seemed to have every reason to skip senior year and enter the upcoming draft. But Aaron also knew that there were questions about his behavior and his drug use—questions that he would have to address at the league’s upcoming Scouting Combine in Indiana.
To prepare, Aaron spent several weeks on the West Coast, where Brian Murphy, the founder of Athletes First—the sports agency Aaron had signed with—oversaw his training for the NFL Combine and Pro Day.
“He flew out to California, with his brother, and lived here for two and a half months,” Murphy says. “That’s what we do with all our recruits. These days, we spend about $75,000, $100,000 on each person. We have our own training facility. They train there. They work out with our tight end coaches. We give them a physical therapist, a soft tissue specialist, a mental health specialist. We teach them the ins and outs of the NFL.
“We got to spend every day with Aaron. We talked about his past. We talked about where he grew up. We talked about his dad. We talked about his mom. We talked about everything. I really got to know him well.
“The idea is to get these players ready for the draft and ready for life. You’re not in Florida anymore. You can’t be late for meetings. You can’t play by your own rules. And Aaron tried his hardest.”
In February 2010, Aaron joined Tim Tebow, Maurkice Pouncey, Brandon Spikes, and six other Gators who had flown to the Combine in Indianapolis.
Aaron had torn a muscle in his back and stood on the sidelines as dozens of scouts, assistants, and coaches watched his teammates drill and work out. The prospects were tested for their speed, strength, and stamina, for their intelligence—even for the flexibility of their joints.
By the end of the testing, few of Aaron’s teammates had impressed the scouts.
More than one scout voiced his doubts about Tebow, worrying about the quarterback’s accuracy and release speed. But if the scouts were skeptical about Florida’s star QB, they were fascinated by Aaron Hernandez.
“He weighed in, got measured, did the body test,” Brian Murphy said. “Most importantly, he did all of the interviews. He had an inordinate amount of interviews with the teams. There’s some physical testing he did not do. But the reality with Aaron was, no one in the NFL cared about watching him physically work out. Everyone knew he was a freak of nature. They didn’t want to waste time. They didn’t care. They wanted to spend time with him. They wanted to interview him in those fifteen-minute slots. Everyone wanted to see what he was like in person.”
For all of his charm, Aaron did not do well in the interviews. The NFL scouts seemed to see right through his mask.
“Self-esteem is quite low,” one would note. “Not well-adjusted emotionally, not happy, moods unpredictable, not stable, doesn’t take much to set him off, but not an especially jumpy guy.”
“It was pretty well known that he had failed some drug tests at Florida, and there were questions about his maturity that come along with that,” another scout told Boston Globe reporter Shalise Manza Young. “You worried about the people he hung out with.”
“The year before he came out, I was at their Pro Day, and I remember seeing the Pounceys, and then him,” an AFC college director told NFL Network reporter Albert Breer. “It was very clear that they were the leaders, that they were the influential guys, and he was behind them, a tagalong, a follower in that sense. He was always following them. And they were trying to bring him along.”
The Pouncey twins had a bad reputation among the scouts. And Hernandez was already known for his drug use, and for his knack for getting himself out of scrapes.
“They couldn’t pin a lot of stuff on him,” another AFC college scouting director told Breer. “But people at the school would tell you, ‘Every time there’s an issue, he’s around it.’ He was a con guy. Very believable. Spoke well. A lot of things inside of you hoped you’d turn him around, but people that I talked to said they didn’t trust him, that he’d burn you.”
The perspective on Aaron Hernandez was simple: He was smart—smart enough to beat the system. But he could also be reckless, if not downright self-destructive.
“He was very, very immature,” an NFC personnel executive told Breer. “Urban did him right by having him follow Tebow, and he was such a follower. He could go in any direction. Everyone knew that if you didn’t keep an eye on him, he was an easy guy to persuade to do the wrong thing.”
According to Jonathan Clegg of the Wall Street Journal, a psychological profile assembled by a North Carolina scouting firm called Human Resource Tactics, at the request of several NFL teams, suggested that Aaron enjoyed “living on the edge of acceptable behavior,” and noted that he “may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.”
Hernandez had scored 10 out of 10 for focus, motivation, and mental quickness, 9 out of 10 for self-efficacy and receptiveness to coaching, and 7 out of 10 for dedication. “Hernandez sees himself as a football player above all else,” the report noted. “He will place a high priority on football and what it takes to be successful.” But in the category of “social maturity,” Aaron had scored an abysmal 1, and at the Combine, Aaron was finally forced to admit that the persistent rumors about his drug use were true.
“He admits it,” an NFL executive who spoke with Hernandez told Breer. “He had multiple positive tests, so he either had issues or he’s dumb. One or two tests? Fine. But four, five, six? Come on, now you’ve got an addiction. He’s not a bad kid. He just has an issue.”