When you come out of college and enter the NFL Draft, you get to go through the rigors of the NFL Scouting Combine. The interview portion can be a valuable resource for teams to figure out the players they’re about to invest millions into. It can also be a place where terrible and potentially illegal questions are asked that would never be asked in any other job interview by an actual HR professional.
Sometimes, the prospect may learn something about themselves they didn’t know and that’s what happened to defensive tackle Ross Blacklock. Blacklock revealed to the media that during his meeting with the Las Vegas Raiders, the Raiders asked him about having 37 parking tickets, something he didn’t know about.
On a lighter note, Ross Blacklock on his parking tickets…😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/wwLhO4cPr4
— Garret Price (@DynastyPrice) February 27, 2020
Blacklock found the silver lining in that while he didn’t know about the tickets, all the tickets were paid for so he’s got a clean record. Blacklock figured that the school took the money out of his student account which would make sense why he may not have known about the parking tickets.
There are a variety of different ways to look at this. It’s nice of TCU to deduct the fine from Blacklock’s student account to pay for the ticket because you don’t want someone potentially having their life ruined over unpaid parking tickets, but if Blacklock didn’t know (and this is assuming the school didn’t tell him), how was that helping him learn his lesson to make sure he wouldn’t make that mistake again? If I was parking illegally and didn’t know I was violating the law, I’d probably keep parking illegally. I wouldn’t have known any better. So in that frame of logic, it would make sense Blacklock could rack up 37 parking tickets.
On the other hand, even if the school failed (something we don’t know) to let Blacklock know about the tickets, this would mean he never noticed that his student account was having funds deducted. Looking back, I probably wouldn’t have checked that when I was in college either so I guess I won’t hold that against him. Hopefully, since he’s bound to earn a lot more money, Ross Blacklock now knows to be a bit more aware of his finances.
