This was originally posted on June 26, 2013. We are republishing it today because of recent events—plural—related to the question posed above.

The NFL regularly employs criminals. This is common sense, right? Just today, two of them were arrested: Aaron Hernandez and Ausar Walcott, who was a rookie linebacker for the Cleveland Browns before they too released him today.

That makes 28 NFL players who've been arrested since this year's Super Bowl. There have been a slew of drunken drivings and marijuana possessions, with the occasional craps cheating and gun possession and child abuse and assault. The thing is that it seems normal, if not expected, of the NFL. The conventional, common logic follows: Young, often undereducated men with a penchant for hitting one another and a lot of money and too much time. Why wouldn't they wreak havoc more than the rest of us?

But do they actually?

According to the FBI, in 2011, the estimated arrest rate nationwide was about 4 percent. (So — and yes, this is remedial — if your office has about 100 people in it, about four should get arrested. Hunt them down.) That same year, according to a database kept by the San Diego Union-Tribune, police arrested 48 NFL players. Since there are about 1,696 of them in the league, that rounds out to 2.8 percent. To those of you unimpressed by a 1.2 percent difference, know that a 1.2-percent decrease in arrests nationwide would've meant about 150,000 fewer handcuffs.

And if anything, those numbers do NFL players an injustice: Since men made up three-quarters of the nation's arrests in 2011, the arrest rate for American men overall is actually higher than 4 percent. You can then factor age in there, too, and you'll actually start heading up toward 10 percent of the guys who are the right sex and age to play pro football getting arrested across America. Compared, again, to not even three percent.

This is not to say that the criminals that the NFL does employ shouldn't be chastised and the strength of the league's policies relating to those individuals questioned. This is only to caution, as always, against generalizing to the point where the actual issue gets lost.

Nate Hopper Associate editor Nate Hopper is an associate editor for Esquire magazine.

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