The NFL draft is upon us, and among the myriad story lines concerning prospects is the question of what teams will do about Joe Mixon.
He's considered by many to be among the elite of this year's draft class. One NFL executive told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Bob McGinn that Mixon is the best player in the draft, regardless of position. And yet, as of last week, at least six of 11 teams interviewed have unequivocally removed Mixon from their draft boards because he was caught on video punching a female student in the face in 2014.
This HBO Real Sports/Marist poll, in which 87 percent of fans say they don't want their team drafting a player with a history of violence against women, was almost certainly conducted with Mixon in mind. In a post-Ray Rice NFL, teams are at least aware of the potential public relations fallout from signing players with violent pasts, and fans are becoming increasingly intolerant of rewarding such behavior with contracts and signing bonuses.
Teams are also slowly realizing that regardless of talent level, such players might be more trouble than they're worth.
Take Aaron Hernandez, for example. His is an extreme case and a tragedy all around. But it also wasn't completely out of the blue. Before he was drafted by the Patriots, the former Florida Gator was involved in a bar fight and was questioned by police who were investigating a shooting. As one scout told NFL.com's Albert Breer in 2014, there were rumors on the Florida campus of incidents involving Hernandez's suspected involvement with a gang, though most of that was unsubstantiated. "But people at the school would tell you, 'Every time there's an issue, he's around it.' If there was trouble, Hernandez's name would come up," the scout said.
That's not to say that those with troubled pasts are incapable of reform or that second chances are never warranted. But it behooves teams to heed the warning signs when they're there and to consider the potential consequences of violent tendencies in the same way they do other "character issues" such as recreational marijuana use.
Sure, hindsight is 20/20, and it's easy to retroactively assess scouting reports knowing what we know now. But we also now know that there are often tangible consequences to teams that sign players with issues that don't remain "off the field," infiltrating locker rooms and sidelines.
In February 2015, the Panthers released defensive end Greg Hardy; he had been convicted for beating his girlfriend, but the conviction was thrown out because the victim refused to appear at the retrial. Less than a month later, the Cowboys signed him to a one-year, incentive-laden deal worth up to $13 million, even without yet knowing whether the league would suspend him.
Hardy's tenure in Dallas is a cautionary tale in signing a player with a demonstrably troubling past. He became a polarizing figure among teammates, showing up late to meetings yet still receiving prime playing time. A month after signing, Hardy got into an altercation at practice with a teammate who questioned his work ethic and called him a "woman beater." During a game against the Giants early that season, he shoved a coach and verbally fought with Dez Bryant on the sideline. At one point, the Cowboys hired extra security just to keep an eye on him.
As with Hernandez, the writing was on the wall with Hardy, but the Cowboys refused to see it. Days before releasing him, Panthers GM Dave Gettleman spoke about staying away from players with character issues. "Who wants a ticking time bomb?" Gettleman said, while not directly mentioning Hardy himself.
The NFL needs to figure out what it can do to address players with checkered pasts. It's unrealistic to expect a full-on ban like the one Indiana University recently announced, stating that the school would not sign athletes with felony convictions for violence against women. But the league will be confronted with this familiar pattern time and again until it comes up with a pragmatic solution.
Of course, even if the NFL were to ban convicted athletes, the myriad cases that are less cut-and-dried would still stymie teams. Hernandez, Hardy and Mixon are the extreme cases, and with both Hardy and Mixon, we have the benefit of courtroom decisions and photographic evidence of their assaults. In cases lacking those, teams would still have to decide for themselves whether players' off-the-field behavior presents a risk to their organization -- whether those guys are, in fact, "ticking time bombs."
All signs point to Mixon being more trouble than he's worth.
Still, it remains to be seen whether teams think he's worth the risk. But if history shows us anything, it's that, in addition to sending the right message and taking violence against women seriously and showing abusers and accusers that consequences can be real, passing on such a player also spares teams a toxic influence in the locker room that may or may not outweigh their influence on the field.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story included an accusation made last week against Mixon that has since been recanted.