Sam Hurd is The Hurdest Fool

Today, I heard one of the craziest, most amazing, logic-defying, made-for-the-movies stories I've heard from the NFL in years. And, no, it did not involve Tim Tebow. Wide receiver Sam Hurd, who played most of his career for the Dallas Cowboys and this season was a member of the Chicago Bears, was arrested last night by an undercover agent, and is now in federal custody for allegedly being one of the heads of a major drug dealing network. Here's the article from the Washington Post.

Wow. 

That's right, Hurd was attempting to purchase 1000 pounds of marijuana and 10 kg of cocaine to sell PER WEEK. Now I'm no drug dealing expert, but according to some quick Googling research, coke usually is sold for about $100 a gram, and weed for about $300 an ounce. Hurd reportedly was looking to buy the marijuana at $450 a pound and the cocaine at $25,000 a kilogram. That means profits for his drug dealing business would have been somewhere around $5,100,000 PER WEEK!

In contrast, Hurd's contract that he signed with the Bears this past offseason was a 3-year deal worth about $5,150,000. Now, to be fair, these drug dealing profits are exaggerated because they are based on what the undercover agent was offering to Hurd. But Hurd still claimed to be selling 4 kilograms of coke per week and was looking to expand his drug dealing business. This has to be one of the more interesting side-jobs among NFL players.

You'd have to assume that now that he's been busted, the playing career of the NFL's Diego Montoya is finished. However, this news makes what was a statistically unremarkable career quite impressive indeed. Primarily a special teams player, Hurd caught 53 passes for 739 yards and 2 TDs in his 6-year career as a wide receiver—pretty unimpressive stats for a wide receiver, even for a single season. Now put into a new light though, these statistics are nothing short of remarkable for a guy who was a large-scale drug dealer and probable user who was frequently surrounded by obscene amounts of weed and cocaine.

There are still a ton of unanswered questions remaining, however. Why does an NFL player who is making millions of dollars per year resort to dealing drugs for money in the first place? Or, for that matter, why does a drug dealer making millions of dollars PER MONTH resort to playing football for money? Is being an average-mediocre NFL wide receiver now the ultimate cover-up for running a drug ring? Cincinatti Bengal wide receiver Jerome Simpson seemed to think so as well, as he was busted for following a similar plan earlier this season but he was getting a measly by comparison 2.5 pounds of marijuana shipped to his house, not looking to deal 1,000 a week!

Also, with multiple drug busts coming out of the NFL in just a few months, how widespread has recreational drug use and drug dealing become among NFL players? Has football gone from Joe Montana's league to Tony Montana's league? Hurd and Simpson are accused of spreading drugs among teammates and other NFL players, so one also has to wonder how Hurd, Simpson, and presumably others have affected the careers of their NFL peers. How great could Roy Williams have been if he hadn’t had Sam Hurd’s teammate the last four seasons? You’re not trying to tell me it’s sheer coincidence that he and Hurd switched from Dallas to Chicago together this past offseason.

Hurd’s Wikipedia page mentions that Terrell Owens was his mentor when they were teammates on Dallas. What does that mean? It wouldn’t appear based on the stats that TO taught Hurd much in terms of how to have success on the football field, so what did he teach him? If anything is apparent from this absurd story, it’s that you’re looking for trouble if Terrell Owens is your mentor. Was TO Jerome Simpson’s “mentor” as well when he was his teammate on Cincinatti last year? And good grief, how many other young wide receivers in the NFL has TO “mentored”?!

Most of all though, this story is a startling reminder of the widespread legal troubles into which NFL players, particularly wide receivers, seem intrinsically inclined to put themselves. Teams cannot remain so clueless about what their players do off the field, especially with this new flock of receivers who model themselves on the trash-talking, immature, pseudo-gangster personality that became synonymous with the position since Michael Irvin created the prototype in the 1990s. Sam Hurd’s arrest is only the latest in the twisted evolution of this paradigm as it became more and more deformed over the years through the wild antics of modern day stars like Terrell Owens, Randy Moss, Chad Ochocinco, and countless others. Now, it appears it has made the precarious transformation from pseudo-gangster to true gangster. The NFL clearly can’t keep pushing the brewing chaos of wide receivers’ personal lives under the rug any longer, and unless it wants to see its image hurt by a callow crew of wild wideouts, it needs to take serious measures to stop the madness before it gets more out of hand.