Football

The automobile crash Rueben Bain was involved in that eventually resulted in the death of one of his passengers in 2024 was the subject of teams asking the top NFL draft prospect about the issue in meetings as early as the NFL Combine, and some teams were not happy with how he handled those questions.One general manager who OutKick spoke to Monday afternoon said Bain outright declined to discuss the matter. Another NFL source who sat in on a Bain interview with his team said Bain seemed prepared for the topic but "provided nothing that made us feel he's sorry or learned from the accident."And that leads to a couple of points:Firstly, it reconfirms NFL teams knew about the multiple accidents Bain was involved in during his career at the University of Miami that went unreported until Sunday when multiple outlets, including OutKick, uncovered them. OutKick on Sunday reported at least three teams were aware of Bain's driving history and that number has grown to six by Monday. And the Detroit Lions are one of those."We've known that for a while, so that doesn't really change anything from our standpoint," Lions general manager Brad Holmes said at the team's pre-draft press conference.The next issue NFL teams will be addressing is to decide how they feel about Bain in context of his great football gifts compared to his accidents and how those shape him off the field.Has he learned a lesson?Has he matured?Is he of the mind that he can shake loose of difficult situations in the future because he has money?"Like it or not, we have to ask ourselves those questions," an NFL personnel evaluator told OutKick.Bain has had meetings with the Cowboys, Chiefs, Titans, and Bengals among others.Holmes and the Lions are currently at No. 17 in the first round. They are not expected to have a chance to pick Bain barring significant new revelations on the player before draft night on April 23 that would lower his draft stock.(That is always possible, as Laremy Tunsil learned in 2016 when a video of him smoking marijuana through a gas mask was released just prior to the draft.).But otherwise, teams beyond the top 10 in the draft probably are not expecting Bain to be on the board when they select.That makes the point that teams have had time to digest the facts around the deadly crash, a second crash about a year later, and eventually, how they feel Bain has grown (or not) from those.You should not, by the way, be surprised NFL teams would know Bain's driving history before the media did.All teams have security departments, and almost all staff those with former law enforcement officers from former FBI agents to others. Those are tasked with doing background checks and writing reports on all the players the team's scouting department identifies as possible draft picks.And while sometimes those investigations don't always identify every possible red flag in a prospect's history, the sense is the Bain accidents didn't surprise many, if any, NFL teams.