Jalen Carter’s warrants send ripples through Bears’ draft plans

INDIANAPOLIS — He didn’t know it then, but Ryan Poles was prescient.

“I’ve been in this league long enough that some curveball’s going to pop up,” the Bears general manager said Tuesday morning. “And we’re going to have to adapt and adjust to it.”

The next morning came the curveball — one that could hamper the Bears’ ability to trade their No. 1 overall pick and still end up with a star defensive player in next year’s draft.

The stakes for Georgia defensive tackle Jalen Carter, though, are much more serious.

Wednesday, the Athens-Clarke (Ga.) County Police Department issued warrants for his arrest in the wake of the Jan. 15 death of former teammate Devin Willock and Georgia staffer Chandler LeCroy in a car accident. He was charged with reckless driving and racing, both of which are misdemeanors in Georgia.

Their deaths less than a week after the Bulldogs won the national championship were originally characterized as a one-car accident. A police investigation, though, found that both LeCroy and Carter were “operating their vehicles in a manner consistent with racing” around 2:30 a.m. Evidence showed the cars — Carter was driving a 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk and LeCroy a 2021 Ford Expedition — switched lanes and drove in oncoming lanes at high speeds. LeCroy’s car reached about 104 mph, the report said, and she had a blood-alcohol concentration of .197 at the time of the crash. She and Willock died, and two others in her car were injured, when they veered off the road and hit power poles and trees.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Wednesday morning that Carter, 21, left the scene of the crash before emergency crews arrived and returned less than two hours later. The newspaper said it reviewed documents that said Carter told police officers differing stories about his role in the crash, first claiming he was a mile away and later saying he was following the Expedition when it crashed.

Speaking two hours before the news of Carter’s warrants send shockwaves through the NFL world, former Bulldogs linebacker Nolan Smith grew emotional when talking about Willock.

“I love him,” he said. “And he never did anything wrong in his three years. He was supposed to graduate.”

In a statement, Georgia coach Kirby Smart called the charges “deeply concerning, especially as we are still struggling to cope with the devastating loss of two beloved members of our community.”

Carter was scheduled to speak to the media at 10:30 a.m. at the NFL Scouting Combine, a weeklong job interview that was expected to cement him as one of the top five players taken in the draft. He never showed up.

In a statement he released hours later, Carter said he learned about the warrants in a phone call from police Wednesday morning and intends to return to Athens “to answer the misdemeanor charges against me and to make sure that the complete and accurate truth is presented.” He pushed back against details of media reports, but did not offer specifics.

“There is no question in my mind that when all of the facts are known that I will be fully exonerated of any criminal wrongdoing,” he said.

NFL teams will do their own investigation into the accident and Carter’s background. Teams hire out companies each year to research the backgrounds of draft-eligible players, and top choices often receive the most scrutiny.

The Bears — and others — will undoubtedly have questions about Carter’s role in the crash and whether he left the scene without helping his friends.

Carter and other defensive linemen met with NFL teams on Tuesday night before the warrants were issued. He had not planned on participating in drills at the Combine — skipping them is becoming increasingly common for top prospects — and said he would do so at Georgia’s pro day March 15. He can meet with NFL teams at their own facilities — each squad gets 30 such interviews — in the lead-up to the April 27 draft.

“It’s going to be pretty heavily investigated by the media …” Commanders GM Martin Mayhew said Wednesday. “We’ll track that. … We have very thorough analysis of these guys’ background, especially any criminal activity or criminal behavior.”

Since he joined the Bears last year, Poles signed three free agents who were then arrested: receiver Byron Pringle (reckless driving with a suspended license), linebacker Matthew Adams (possession of a loaded firearm without a state license) and receiver David Moore (drug and weapons charges). He stuck by all three.

Drafting Carter as one of the faces of the franchise, though, would be a different matter altogether. It would require the Bears to be thoroughly comfortable with his role in the Jan. 15 crash.

Carter is not the first prospect to face serious legal issues just weeks before the draft, but he’s probably the best. In 2015, LSU offensive lineman La’el Collins went undrafted after reports swirled that he would be questioned in the shooting death of a woman. He was never charged and signed a free-agent deal with the Cowboys. The next year, video of Ole Miss tackle Laremy Tunsil smoking a gas-mask bong leaked on draft night, causing him to slip to the 13^th pick.

The Bears covet a three-technique defensive tackle, and Carter has been the best college player at the position the past two seasons. It’s the most important position in head coach Matt Eberflus’ 4-3 scheme. He has called the tackle position the “engine” of his defense.

Carter’s warrants complicate the Bears’ trade-down scenarios, too. Poles’ preference is to trade the No. 1 pick to a quarterback-needy team and move down in the draft. Adding future draft picks only makes sense, though, if he can still land a blue-chip prospect after trading down.

That would be much harder to do if Carter’s stock plummets.