No pickin’ Mixon for Gang Green
It’s probably safe to cross Joe Mixon off your list of future Jets. General manager Mike Maccagnan didn’t definitively declare whether or not the polarizing Oklahoma running back is off Gang Green’s draft board, but he strongly suggested that his team will pass on the talented, but troubled ball carrier.
Several teams have already eliminated Mixon from their plans thanks to an ugly incident nearly three years ago that resulted in the football player punching a female Oklahoma student. Mixon paid a small price for his vile act — a one-year hiatus from playing football — but it’s clear that Maccagnan has little tolerance for such despicable behavior.
“There’s some things that are extremely egregious that I personally have a very hard time condoning,” Maccagnan said Monday about players with incidents of violent behavior toward women. “And (domestic) violence in particular is a very serious thing to me. For me and my wife, we’ve had a personal experience with that.… We don’t take it lightly.”
Close friends of the Maccagnans were killed in a domestic violence murder-suicide nearly seven years ago. The tragedy prompted the general manager and his wife, Betty, to become actively involved in the One Love Foundation to raise awareness about the warning signs of domestic violence.
So, it’s hard to imagine Maccagnan drafting a player who fled the scene after punching a woman.
Mixon and the victim, Amelia Molitor, reached a civil settlement agreement last week, but that will almost certainly have no impact on the Jets strategy whether or not to take a chance on a player, who had 1,812 total yards and 15 touchdowns last season. By most accounts, Mixon is a Top 10 talent who will probably to slide to the late first round at the earliest given his offfield transgression.
“We vet this stuff as thoroughly as we can,” Maccagnan said about his philosophy on evaluating players with off-field acts of violence on their resume. “We try to make sure we’re accurate in terms of passing our verdict on if we think they’re guilty or bad or whatever. We take that very seriously.”
Maccagnan isn’t averse to adding players with questionable pasts (see: Austin Seferian-Jenkins’s DUI incidents), but violence against women is an altogether different story. Florida defensive lineman Caleb Brantley faces misdemeanor battery charges for displacing a woman’s tooth after punching her in the face. It’s fair to say that he won’t be wearing green-and-white, either.