“The thing that draws me to Joe Mixon is not only the productivity, but the fact he didn’t run away from what he did.”
The Draft’s most controversial player has naturally become the most polarizing when it comes to his future presence in the NFL. With some teams even publicly pushing away from the Sooners star or burying him on their draft board altogether, Doug Gottlieb says he would take a chance on the tarnished Oklahoma running back.
“I was appalled but I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t surprised, this is what domestic violence looks like,” Gottlieb said of Mixon’s ugly 2014 surveillance video from college punching a girl in the face. “Having gone to school in that part of the country and having carried my own scarlet letter, I can tell you that everybody knew about Joe Mixon. Everybody knew about him as a recruit and everybody knew about him as someone who hit a woman.”
Despite his off the field problems, Mixon didn’t just crawl into a cave and die when his career seemed over; a facet of Mixon that Gottlieb says doesn’t wash away his darkened past, but a fact that can make an owner or a coach feel confident enough to have him a part of their football team going forward.
“We’re not employing choir boys here,” he said. “To climb out of the bottom of the gutter to the top of college football? I’ve always been a, ‘don’t tell me about the guy who either knocked himself down, shot himself in the foot or got knocked down’ but a ‘what did you do to dust yourself off and get back up?’”