When Aaron Hernandez was arrested back in the summer of 2013 for allegedly killing his friend Odin Lloyd, Patriots owner Robert Kraft came out and said that his entire franchise felt "duped" by their tight end.
"No one in our organization was aware of any of these kind of connections," he said at the time. "If [Hernandez killing Lloyd] is true, I'm just shocked."
As it turns out, though, New England may have known more than they led us to believe. Former Patriots senior football adviser Floyd Reese did an interview with The MMQB this week and admitted that the team was aware of some of Hernandez's issues before drafting him.
"We knew he had some issues prior," Reese said. "[Former Florida coach] Urban Meyer and Bill [Belichick] were very, very close, and I think Urban convinced Bill that, you know, that these things weren't going to be an issue. When we structured his first contract, his rookie contract, we probably had 75 percent of the money in the contract set up so that he would only make it if he stayed out of trouble, didn't miss meetings, was always there doing the right thing. And for that period of the original contract, he lived up to every bit of it. So it turned out well. Of course, after that, after he signed [a $40 million contract extension], things kind of went awry."
"Kind of went awry"? Yeah, that's putting it mildly. And now, Hernandez is likely going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Those "issues" that he had were much larger than anyone could have projected.
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[via Eye on Football]
