Jenkins played at Florida before off-field issues got him dismissed from the team.  (Getty Images)

After LSU's Morris Claiborne, Janoris Jenkins of North Alabama is the NFL Draft's best cornerback. But come April 26, Jenkins won't be the second CB to come off the board. In fact, he may not hear his named called at all during the draft's first round. That's because of the dreaded off-field issues that began at the University of Florida, Jenkins' first stop before finishing his college career at Division II North Alabama.

According to NFL Network's Albert Breer, who spoke to several NFL front-office types and scouts, Jenkins, for all his on-the-field upside, Jenkins has too much baggage to touch in Round 1.  He was dismissed from the Florida football team in April 2011 due to a second drug-related arrest in three months. But nothing changed after he arrived at North Alabama.

"He's running with the wrong people," an NFC personnel executive told Breer. "They gave him every chance in the world at Florida, and it didn't work. … And he gets to North Alabama, and he's still smoking because he's got this big-fish, little-pond thing going. I don't see him going in the first round, and a lot of teams have him off their board completely."

An AFC personnel executive sounded a similar alarm. "This is a multiple offender of the drug policy in college, and it's not like there were no character concerns at North Alabama," he explained to Breer. "He had multiple opportunities to get away from it. He didn't at Florida, and he went to North Alabama and he wasn't clean there. You just wish the situation at North Alabama was clean, that he had a rebirth, from a personal and football character standpoint. But it was more of the same."

To Jenkins' credit, he didn't shy away from his past at the February combine. He called the multiple drug-related run-ins with the law a learning experience and proclaimed that he's finished with marijuana.

"I'm done with it forever," he said in Indianapolis. "I can't do it, man."

The problem: it may be too late.

Of course, it only takes one team to place more value on talent than character for that to all change. It's why the Titans took West Virginia cornerback Pacman Jones with the No. 6 pick in 2005, and in the extreme, why the Rams thought it was a good idea to draft Nebraska running back Lawrence Phillips sixth overall in 1996.

Breer mentioned the Bengals and Patriots as possible suitors. The former, presumably, because they haven't shied away from bad apples for a bargain (the results were predictable -- Cincy led the lead in arrests from 2000-2011); the latter because head coach Bill Belichick has had some success with fringe players (Corey Dillion, Randy Moss and Aaron Hernandez, for example, although less so with Albert Haynesworth).

Last year, the Ravens took cornerback Jimmy Smith 27th overall, a player most draft experts pegged as a top-10 talent who slipped because of -- you guessed it -- character concerns. The Patriots have two first-round selections later this month and a clear need in the secondary, but the Boston Globe's Greg Bedard "would be shocked" if Belichick used one of them on Jenkins because that's where the team "usually manage(s) risk." That said, New England also has two second-rounders and Bedard thinks Jenkins is a possibility then.

We'll know one way or the other in 14 days. Or, more likely, 15.

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