Lions GM hasn't removed Joe Mixon from draft board, wishes he was at NFL combine
INDIANAPOLIS — Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon might not be one of the 330 draft prospects in town this week, but that doesn’t mean at least one NFL team’s general manager is happy about that.
Detroit Lions general manager Bob Quinn said Wednesday that Mixon, who was not invited to the NFL scouting combine because of his off-field transgressions, should be here.
“It’s really disappointing he’s not here,” Quinn said of Mixon. “We come here to see the best college football players … For him not being here because of those issues, personally I don’t think that’s real fair because we have a lot of investigation that we want to do on him and to get him in one [place] for all the teams would have been great.”
Mixon is not here namely because of a 2014 incident in which he punched a woman, breaking multiple bones in her face. Mixon sat out that season and later avoided jail time with a plea agreement, but he played the past two seasons for the Sooners, becoming one of the best running backs in college football.
Mixon recently apologized for the incident in his first extended comments on the matter since the graphic video of him hitting the young woman was released. He’ll next work out in front of NFL eyes at Oklahoma’s pro day on March 8 after the combine ends.
The NFL adopted a new policy about the league allowing itself more flexibility to either not issue a combine invitation to a troubled prospect such as Mixon or even to issue one and then later rescind it, as what happened to Ole Miss QB Chad Kelly.
The gray area over who cannot attend because of arrests or incidents in their background has proven to be thorny for the NFL. The league feels the optics of giving players with domestic violence incidents on their record is not worth it for the potentially bad attention it brings. Quinn said having them at the combine would help teams vet their character even more and judge them properly.
“I’m not a part of those decisions about how those guys are chosen, but I think it’s a disappointment that guys like him — and there’s a few others you can put in that category — we’re going to be chasing around in the months of March and April,” Quinn said. “And it’s really unfair to the players, to be honest with you.
“The door’s open, and I’d like to get to get the chance to sit down with the people that know Joe, or Joe [himself], and see what the circumstances were around the incident.”
Moments later, Quinn confirmed that Mixon remained on the Lions’ draft board — this despite saying at his first news conference after taking the Lions GM job that he and the team would have a “zero tolerance” policy related to domestic violence incidents. Quinn recently said he rethought his philosophy on that.
“Looking back, I probably should not have said that because the more you do research on each individual incident, what you read in the newspaper and on the Internet is actually sometimes not accurate,” Quinn said in January, via Detroit Free Press.
As Yahoo Sports’ Charles Robinson wrote recently, Mixon typically fits into two categories — too troubled or too talented to ignore — among NFL teams. Having Mixon at the combine, needing to answer to a gauntlet of teams asking him about the incident, wouldn’t be considered a privilege in all respects.
The Lions have not ruled out Mixon to this point. We shall see if things change if or when they sit down with him.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
