Buccaneers near top of NFL arrests database

Bleeding Green Nation collected a bunch of NFL arrests and from the UT San Diego arrests database, and made a nice chart for us to quickly see that the Buccaneers fielded a lot of arrested player since 2000.

With 30 arrests, the Buccaneers are the fifth-most arrested team in the NFL over the past decade-and-a-half. Somehow, a few teams have managed just nine arrests, while the vast majoirty fall in the 12-20 range.

There was certainly a time when the Buccaneers seemed to care a little less about off-field character, with Aqib Talib and Jerramy Stevens being probably the biggest examples of "we don't care, as long as you can play" attitude.

The question is whether there's anything wrong with that attitude. The list of the top offending teams is ugly, and features mostly teams that haven't exactly been successful over the past decade, but the least-offending teams in the NFL are Arizona, St. Louis and Houston. Not a championship group, right there.

As a general rule, you probably don't want to pass on every character issue you come across, simply because that means you're passing on talented players. But you don't want to start collecting players with off-the-field issues, either. As with so many things in football, you probably have to find a balance. Very insightful, I know.

Ultimately, this ranking probably means nothing. There's a fair bit of luck involved (you can't predict every misstep), there's no differentiation between various types of arrests, and we don't really know how many of those arrests were predictable. That is, was there any reason to believe prior to those arrests that those players presented an arrest-risk?