Handful of Accused 1st-Rounders Clean

So, remember those "reports" of players who had failed drug tests at the combine? B.J. Raji (pictured), Vontae Davis, Clay Matthews and Brian Cushing had all allegedly tested positive -- Raji and Davis for marijuana, Matthews and Cushing for steroids -- according to the irresponsibly named NFLDraftBible.com (who I refuse to link to, due to the fact that they are looking increasingly like an absolute farce).

Well, the more distance we get from the faux-report, the more the facts come to the surface, and it doesn't look good for the credibility -- if they even had any in the first place -- of this supposed "bible." Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk is reporting that Raji is clean, as are the other three.

As Florio opines, these players should own the rights to this laughingstock of a website after this fiasco. You can't just create fake stories from out of thin air and possibly ruin the draft value of four talented soon-to-be NFL players. The NFL draft is big business, especially the first round. Each slot lower in the first round could cost the player millions of dollars, and placing any amount of doubt about a player's character can easily damage his value to potential suitors.

Another lingering issue is the SI.com report where they confirmed Raji's alleged positive test. The reporter who broke the story, Tony Pauline, seems to be sticking to his story, though coming clean and running a retraction is probably the right thing to do.

The end result should be a good one for the four players in question, though. They have nearly a week to convince teams this "report" was fake and they are perfectly clean until the first round of the draft transpires. The teams should all have access to the test results, and have likely been doing their due diligence in the meantime anyway.

Finally, if it seems like I'm being harsh with "NFL Draft Bible," it's intentional. There's a reason blogs and internet reporting have a bad name to old-school newspaper-types, and sites like this perpetuate the overgeneralized myth that all internet work is garbage. I'd like to suggest that if the best work you can on a website is just making stuff up in a desperate attempt to gain traffic that you simply pack it up and move on. Those of us who do honest, hard work don't appreciate being lumped in with your kind.

Related: WalterFootball.com has a pretty solid beatdown of the site.