The Problem
IT SAYS SOMETHING about the moral compass of the NFL that, despite punching a woman in the face — breaking four bones — the debate around the upcoming NFL Draft is not whether Joe Mixon will be drafted, but rather if he’ll still be available by the third round.
For fans of professional American football, this should not come as a surprise.
In the past five years, there have been no fewer than 23 arrests for domestic violence involving NFL players, and a further 16 arrests for assault.
It’s a league where Tyreek Hill — that’s him wearing the number 10 — is openly celebrated by the official NFL Twitter account (with its 20 million followers) despite the fact he choked his pregnant girlfriend before punching her in the stomach.
It’s a league where the New York Giants can sign kicker Josh Brown to a two-year, $4 million deal despite knowing of his involvement in multiple assaults on his wife Molly.
Indeed, the fact that it’s a league where so much crime is committed by players that there is a website dedicated to tracking it is pretty damning in itself.
Hill’s case is the most relevant to Mixon’s as both incidents happened while the players were still in college, both involved assaults on women and both left NFL teams facing moral dilemmas come draft time.
However, a significant difference between the pair is that while Mixon was suspended for a season, Hill’s punishment for the assault on his then-girlfriend was to be cut by his team, Oklahoma State.
Despite being a so-called first round talent, Hill then dropped to the fifth round of the 2016 NFL Draft where he was eventually selected by the Kansas City Chiefs, much to the annoyance of some fans not long removed from their linebacker, Jovan Belcher, murdering the mother of his child, Kasandra Perkins, before ending his own life.
Of course, the nature of sports is that some of those same fans were actively cheering for him as his on-field talent came to the fore and showed him to be one of the most dynamic young playmakers in the NFL.
In time, given his own talent, the same will likely happen with Mixon.
The Player, Part I
17-year old Joe Mixon was a five-star recruit coming out of high school in Oakley California and rated by rivals.com as the second best running back in the country, and eighth best player overall.
Out of nearly 1.1 million high school players, that’s not bad at all.
Unsurprisingly, he had scholarship offers from no less than 49 colleges, including perennial National Championship contenders Alabama and Florida State.
Mixon snubbed them in favour of Oklahoma — not to be confused with arch rivals Oklahoma State where Hill played — following in the footsteps of DeMarco Murray and Adrian Peterson, a player who, by the way, was suspended by the NFL in 2014 for hitting his son with a switch (a small tree branch).
“People were really excited (about Mixon’s signing), because it was just a day or two after the team had beaten Alabama in the Sugar Bowl so everyone was really fired up,” says Ryan Aber, Oklahoma Sooners beat writer for The Oklahoman.
“All of a sudden they have one of the best running backs in the country committed to playing for their team. At that point everyone was swept up and really excited to get this kid.
“This is, historically, one of the best running back schools in the country.”
The Punch
I actually talked to Cale Gundy (a coach at Oklahoma) a couple of days before the incident and he had spoken about how mature Mixon was, how he was ready to play his freshman year. All the focus was on him, he was going to play and he was going to be a really big part of that offence,” says Aber of the summer of 2014.
But on 24 July 2014, the night of his 18th birthday, Mixon found himself at Pickleman’s Cafe on Campus Corner, a popular spot with students because it stays open long after the bars close at 2am.
And it was there he punched Amelia Molitor so hard in the face that the then 20-year old suffered multiple fractured bones and required an eight-hour surgery to wire her jaw shut.
According to police statements, and the grainy CCTV video of the assault, it played out something like this.
After walking into the cafe, an exchange of homophobic and racial slurs occurred between Mixon and friend of Molitor’s, the order of which remains unclear.
Molitor’s reaction was to shove the running back, who lunged at her with a closed fist by his side.
Molitor then slapped at Mixon, who hit her with a right hook that saw her head slam into a table before hitting the ground. Her injuries included a fractured jaw and cheekbone, as well as fractures to two other bones in her face.
Mixon then left Pickleman’s, less than 30 seconds after he arrived.
Molitor was helped by friends to Norman Regional Hospital where she had the eight-hour surgery to wire her jaw shut.
The Police
“The investigation was pretty slow to get going, from the police side,” says Aber.
“Obviously they had to get statements but they waited a little bit to talk to Amelia Molitor — our paper was actually speaking to her the day after — but the news got out pretty quickly on the night because that’s an area of campus with a lot of people out there at that time of night and, obviously, college football players are really well-known around here.”
In October 2014, Mixon reached an Alford plea deal on the criminal charges brought against him.
An Alford plea essentially allows the accused to officially claim innocence, but at the same time consent to the fact that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict him/her of the crime he/she is accused of.
While the criminal investigation has closed, a civil trial is still ongoing, though a date has yet to be set.
The Punishment
After the incident, Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops suspended Mixon for the entirety of the 2014 season, but refused to cut him saying he felt his young charge could be redeemed.
As part of the Alford plea, Mixon was also sentenced to 100 hours of community service, cognitive behavior counselling and a year of probation.
Interestingly, after video of the punch was released in December 2016 — a move Molitor opposed as she said it breached her privacy – Stoops told the New York Times that, had it been available at the time, he would have cut Mixon from the team.
Aber says the attitude to incidents like this, involving high-profile players, was different in 2014.
“At the time it was 50/50 because the Ray Rice video hadn’t come out and that obviously changed people’s perception of these kind of incidents.
I think at that time most people saw it as ‘keep him on the team, suspend him, but don’t kick him off completely.’ Now, obviously that changed a couple of years later when the video emerged, but the climate was that people were willing to give him a chance.”
Mixon bears a remarkable similarity to the aforementioned Rice, who was initially suspended for just two games by the NFL for punching his fiancee unconscious and dragging her out of a Las Vegas elevator.
For reference, the NFL suspended Tom Brady for four games last season because he may have been aware that some footballs were tampered with.
However, after video emerged of the Rice incident, he was suspended indefinitely by the league — a decision Rice eventually overturned on appeal — but he has not played in the NFL since.
“I think the fact there is a video has played a major role,” says Aber.
“When he’s drafted it’s going to be played. When he makes his first carry it’s going to be played. At all the high profile moments during his career, that video is going to come up and that’s not going to change.
“It’s a whole lot different for an announcer to talk about it or a reporter to write about it than it is for a video to be out there for all to see and, like I said, it’s going to keep being a part of his story.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the existence of the video and the availability of the video has hurt his stock. Tyreek Hill got drafted in the fifth round and there was no video of his incident.
“That certainly made it much easier to sell as a redemption story versus Joe Mixon.”
The PR
Since the incident, Mixon has apologised just once, in December last year when he told assembled media:
I’m here to apologise to Miss Molitor. I apologise to Coach Stoops, I apologise to President (David) Boren, the AD (athletic director Joe Castiglione), my teammates. And most of all, my family. I let a lot of people down.”
Despite multiple chances since, including a high-profile appearance on the Rich Eisen Show, that’s the only time Mixon has said sorry.
“The problem is, it’s hard to judge how sincere he is given he hasn’t talked about it since,” says Aber.
“He’s brushed it off. We only got to talk to him at the Orange Bowl, right before they played Clemson, where he wouldn’t talk about it at all.
“We’ve seen him have these opportunities to talk about it, to go into things further and sort of prove that he has changed and that he’s not defined by this one incident but, honestly, outside of that one time he hasn’t done much of that.
“My personal opinion is that an incident like this one, I don’t think it should be a disqualifier from playing professional football.
“But it’s also hard for me to go back to the narrative of a redemption story or things like that because I think, as has been proven time after time in sports, we don’t really know these guys, we don’t really know if they’re redeemed or if they’re really good and honourable people.”
The Pushback
I thought that every single person who looked at me knew me and hated me,” Molitor told News OK in 2016.
According to Aber, some did, and some still do.
“I’ve seen it happen myself with virtually everything we write about the case.
“There are people who come out of the woodwork to say ‘well, she pushed him first’ or ‘her friend called him the n-word’ and a lot of people, until the video of the police investigation came out where Joe himself said the slur didn’t come from her, were still arguing she’d said it.
“So there’s a lot of victim-blaming going on, even today, even after the video came out.”
The result has been that Molitor’s online presence is virtually non-existent. Too much abuse. She also had to quit her job on campus. Too much abuse.
She did graduate from Oklahoma in December 2016, some 29 months after the punch.
“Any innocence I had was gone, it robbed me of a full year of the college experience. But it was worth staying. I’m stronger than I ever thought I could be,” she told NewsOK.
The Player, Part II
Mixon’s college experience — one-year suspension aside — was obviously different.
In two seasons, he averaged 6.8 yards on each of his 300 rushing attempts, scoring 17 TDs and added a further 894 yards on 65 catches for nine more touchdowns.
“When you look at what he did,” says Aber, “as limited as his time was here, you’ve got to say Joe Mixon is right up there with some of the best running backs in this school’s football history.”
“Based on the improvement he showed from 2015 to 2016,” says running back expert Matt Claassen of Pro Football Focus, “the year’s suspension doesn’t appear to have hindered him a whole lot.
“I guess if he had that extra year and was in year three of significant playing time, it would be interesting to see where he would be at.
“I don’t think it’s been too much of a hindrance though as you can see in the way he overtook Samaje Perine last year.”
So we know he’s better than his team-mate, but how good is he compared to the rest of this year’s crop of players?
“I’ve talked to some of our senior analysts here in PFF and nobody had him (ranked) lower than four out of this draft class and several people had him at two,” says Claassen.
“Personally, I’d rank him at three, behind Christian McCaffrey and Dalvin Cook.
“His versatility, what he can bring in the passing game as well as the running game, is definitely worth late first round consideration.
“He does have more advanced skills as a receiver than the average player coming out of college, but there are a lot of those players in this draft class.
“There are several really good receiving backs that can really contribute as runners but I think that’s definitely an added element to his game.”
What really helps Mixon stand out on the field though, is his elusiveness, his ability to create space where there appears to be none. That’s why teams are willing to overlook his past.
“His missed tackle rate is within the top five or six in this draft class and he’s well within the top ten in yards after contact.
“There are two aspects to forcing missed tackles and he has both the elusiveness to make defenders miss as well as the power and strength to break through the tackle,” says Claassen.
The Predicament
The 82nd NFL Draft begins next Thursday, but where will Mixon be selected?
We do know that certain teams have already decided to remove him from their draft board, and more may have done so without making the news public.
“The Patriots have generally been a place that is welcoming for guys whose past isn’t, shall we say, perfect, but not for guys who have committed violence against women,” says Aber.
That’s something they have been pretty consistent about. I know that they had a similar path towards Tyreek Hill.
“I think also with Joe, I think it makes sense for some of the big market teams to shy away from him where some of the smaller market teams might be able to get away with it more just because there’s not that constant media crush.
“It’s going to be a story, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that but it won’t be the kind of overwhelming narrative that it would be in a city like New York or Boston or Miami.”
One smaller market team that could be a potential fit are the Chiefs, says Claassen.
“There are a few teams (that fit his style of play) and one that I hadn’t given much consideration to until recently, until a colleague mentioned them during a discussion, was Kansas City.
“Obviously, they didn’t have too much of an issue with Tyreek Hill but it’s not just that.
“Kansas City doesn’t use its backs in a pass-blocking role that much compared to other teams and we know that Andy Reid uses a quick, short passing game and likes to get running backs involved as receivers.
“But, at the same time, we’ve seen Jamaal Charles involved as a number one back and been able to carry the load. I think that would be a really good fit.
“There are a few others, like New Orleans, where they’d be able to use him as a receiving back.
As for when he goes?
“I don’t see him going in the first round, but it’s hard for me to see every team letting him go by the time the middle of the third round comes around and it’s very likely he goes in round two,” says Aber.
That’s a prediction Claassen agrees with:
“It only takes one team to be interested, as we’ve seen with previous players, so it would not surprise me at all if he was gone in day two.
Taking everything into consideration, I think we’ve seen enough from NFL teams that someone will be willing to overlook the off-the-field issues.”
The Postscript
Whatever team does decide to draft Mixon, it’s almost certain they’ll have adopted a ‘buyer beware’ approach.
Since punching Molitor, Mixon was suspended for another game in 2016 after an incident with a traffic warden:
After receiving a parking ticket, Mixon approached the warden and said:
“Don’t put that shit in my face,” before ripping up the ticket and throwing it at the warden.
Mixon then got into his car and “inched at the officer with vehicle in drive to intimidate the officer with vehicle,” the report details.
And just this week, an allegation of violence against another woman emerged when a man named Anthony Hernandez claimed that Mixon punched his daughter in high school, only for the incident to be swept under the carpet:
I know for a fact he threw my daughter to the ground and hit her. I went to the school and they hid him in the office. He got no punishment.
“The police even came. I was escorted off the campus as if I did something wrong. These are simply the facts, he’s a woman beater.”
After Hernandez’s statement, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that two NFL teams had launched an investigation into the claims, which prompted a retraction from the alleged-victim’s father.
Once, when they were in school together, my daughter had a minor disagreement with some of her classmates that got blown out of proportion. Like any father would, I reacted emotionally. Unfortunately, I did so before I had all the facts.
“Now, having talked to my daughter and investigated the whole story, I realise that I was mistaken about Joe’s involvement. I definitely overreacted, and I regret that my words might have given some people the wrong impression about Joe.
“I know that Joe did not hurt my daughter, did not intend to, and would not do so.”
The fact an unsubstantiated claim was treated so seriously by NFL teams shows, at the very least, they are doing their homework before the draft.
Which team decides he’s worth the risk and when, remains a mystery.
That he has the on-the-field talent to be a superstar is not.
How you’d feel if your team drafted him? Well, that’s up to you.
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