This Year’s NFL Draft Not a Sunshine Story for Oklahoma Football

The NFL Draft is supposed to be a special time of personal gratification and reward for the 250 or so college players fortunate enough to have been selected by one of the 32 NFL teams as part of a three-day, nationally televised lottery process.

After all, only a select few of the hundreds of college players who aspire to play the game at the highest level of the sport are considered good enough or worthy of becoming an NFL Draft pick.

Interestingly, while most of the attention, looking both into and out of the process, is focused on the earlier rounds in the draft and most notably on the first 32 players picked, there have been quite a few NFL success stories written by players selected in the later rounds of the draft.

Two of the four players from Oklahoma selected in this year’s draft – running back Joe Mixon and wide receiver Dede Westbrook – were selected in the second and third rounds, respectively. That may not sound like a big deal, except for the fact that multiple NFL draft experts were reporting in the weeks and days leading up to the biggest offseason event in the annual NFL calendar that only a handful of teams were even considering drafting either player.

The reason being: Both Sooner players have incidents of violence against women in their pasts. Ever since the highly publicized 2014 case involving Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens, and several notable domestic violence cases since involving other NFL players, National Football League teams have been highly reluctant to take a chance by retaining an existing player or bringing in a new player with even one incident of violence toward women.

The University of Oklahoma and head football coach Bob Stoops have been in the public crosshairs for a almost three years now for allowing Mixon to remain on the team after he punched a female student, breaking several bones in her face. Mixon was suspended for a year and ordered to complete 100 hours of community service, but was reinstated for the 2015 season..

The versatile Sooner running back was a major contributor to Oklahoma making the College Football Playoff in the 2015 season, winning back-to-back Big 12 championships and handing Auburn, the second best team in the Southeastern Conference last season, a double-digit defeat in the Sugar Bowl.

A couple of weeks before OU’s Sugar Bowl appearance against Auburn, a video of Mixon striking the women, Amelia Molitor, was made public, and the visual images reignited the issue and brought further public outrage against Mixon and the way the Oklahoma football program handled –  or, many would say, mishandled – the situation.

Mixon has made multiple public apologies for the incident and also met with and personally apologized to Ms. Molitor. There isn’t much question in my mind that Mixon deeply regrets what happened, but the fact is there is nothing he can do now to change what happened, other than to learn from the dreadful incident and lead his off-the-field life as a model citizen going forward.

More from OU Football

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• Oklahoma football: ESPN, USA Today bowl projections after Week 3
• Oklahoma football: Sooner ‘D’ grading well, but real test begins with Big 12 play
• Two Oklahoma football players receive Big 12 weekly honors
• Oklahoma football: Sooners’ stock rising fast in ESPN prospective rankings

Late last college football season, it was revealed that Dede Westbrook, the Biletnikoff Award winner last season and a Heisman Trophy finalist, along with his teammate and quarterback, Baker Mayfield, had been involved in two incidents of domestic violence against the mother of his two children. The charges were dismissed in both incidents, but the shadow of doubt and concern now follows the talented wide receiver at a time that is supposed to be one of the most celebrated in his football career.

Now the burden of accountability and public dissatisfaction over the controversial pasts of Mixon and Westbrook transfers over to the Cincinnati Bengals and the Jacksonville Jaguars, the NFL teams that chose to overlook all the public criticism  and decided that what the two players could potentially contribute to the success of those two teams on the field was worth the risk of affording them a second chance.

I was disturbed and, frankly, a bit troubled to see the number of post-draft media coverage that was highly critical of both Cincinnati and Jacksonville because they drafted Mixon and Westbrook, citing the continued apathy at all levels of both amateur and professional sports toward domestic abuse and violence toward women.

Next: What's Next for Joe Mixon

The best thing that the two former Sooner stars can do in the short term and going forward to put this behind them is to continue to dazzle on the field and stay on the straight and narrow off the field. The more the numbers go up on the former category and remain at zero in the latter the more the public spotlight and character assassins will turn their attention elsewhere.

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