Broken Play: The Aaron Hernandez Scouting File the Patriots Already Had

One NFL team’s scouting department removed Aaron Hernandez from its draft board entirely. Another team’s general manager called his file full of red flags. The Patriots drafted him anyway, then paid him $40 million to stay. This is what the record shows about who knew what, and when.

The Scouting File

Before the 2010 NFL Draft, Aaron Hernandez was widely projected as a first- or second-round talent. He fell to the fourth round instead, and the reason was documented, not rumored. Multiple teams’ scouts had flagged failed drug tests at the University of Florida, later reported to number as many as six, along with concerns about his temperament and associations back in his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut.

One NFL general manager later told USA Today Sports that Hernandez’s scouting file contained multiple red flags. An official from a different team said the character concerns were serious enough that the team removed Hernandez from its list of draftable players entirely, before the draft took place. A Boston Globe report from the period quoted a scout calling the drug and character issues “the worst-kept secret in the scouting community.”

The Extension

Hernandez spent his first two seasons producing on the field, and the read on him inside the organization shifted from risk to reward. In August 2012, the Patriots signed him to a five-year contract extension worth up to $40 million, with a $12.5 million guaranteed signing bonus. Owner Robert Kraft praised him publicly as “first-class” as a person during the announcement.

The timing matters for what it does not show as much as what it does. The extension came roughly one month after two men, Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, were shot to death in a drive-by shooting in Boston’s South End on July 16, 2012. Hernandez was not a named suspect at the time the extension was signed. He would not be indicted in that case until May 2014, nearly two years later. Whatever the Patriots knew or didn’t know about that shooting in August 2012, the extension itself was a re-commitment built on the same scouting file that had already documented years of red flags, made at the exact moment the organization had the most leverage to walk away.

The Verdict That Came

On June 17, 2013, the body of Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-professional football player, was found shot multiple times at an industrial park roughly a mile from Hernandez’s home in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. Lloyd had been dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee. Surveillance footage from Hernandez’s own home reportedly showed him leaving with two associates, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz, shortly before Lloyd’s death, and returning later that night with what appeared to be a gun in his hand.

Hernandez was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on June 26, 2013. The Patriots released him less than two hours later, the fastest an organization can move once the cost of a relationship becomes public rather than private. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder on April 15, 2015. He was sentenced to life without parole.

The Case That Didn’t Hold

Hernandez was separately indicted in May 2014 for the unrelated July 2012 double murder of de Abreu and Furtado, the shooting that occurred roughly one month before his contract extension. Prosecutors alleged the killings stemmed from an altercation at a nightclub where one of the victims had accidentally bumped into Hernandez, spilling his drink. A jury acquitted him of those charges on April 14, 2017. Three days later, Hernandez was found dead in his prison cell, in what the medical examiner ruled a suicide.

Because he died before his appeal of the Lloyd conviction was resolved, Massachusetts’s abatement ab initio doctrine required that conviction to be vacated, treating him as if he had never been charged. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reinstated the conviction in 2019 and abolished the doctrine for future cases, ruling that a defendant’s death should not erase a jury’s verdict.

Why This Case Matters

The Chris Benoit installment of this franchise’s sibling series examined a sport with no outside regulator at all. This one is different. The NFL has extensive scouting infrastructure built specifically to assess exactly this kind of risk, and in Hernandez’s case, that infrastructure worked. It produced an accurate file. The failure wasn’t in the system that gathered the information. It was in what an individual organization chose to do with information every other team in the league also had.

That distinction matters for how institutional accountability gets assigned. It is easier to talk about failures of process than failures of judgment, because process failures suggest a fixable gap. Judgment failures suggest a values problem, one where projected on-field production was allowed to outweigh a documented pattern of risk that the organization’s own scouts had already flagged as serious enough to walk away from.