Joe Mixon seemingly can’t outrun his past.
One of the NFL draft’s best prospects at running back continues to have the ghosts of his past chase him, hurting his stock and casting doubt on his pro career. Mixon has already made the rounds with NFL teams and suffered the consequences of being caught on camera punching a woman in the face.
But another report of a similar incident just surfaced Wednesday. Pro Football Talk’s Michael David Smith noted a report from when Mixon was in high school in which a man named Anthony Hernandez accused Mixon of an incident:
I know for a fact he threw my daughter to the ground and hit her. I went to the school and . . . they hid him in the office. He got no punishment. The police even came. I was escorted off the campus as if I did something wrong. These are simply the facts, he’s a woman beater,” Hernandez said in a report read by the lawyer for Amelia Molitor, the victim in Mixon’s highly publicized incident at Oklahoma.
As the hours passed, though, Mixon’s lawyers forward PFT’s Mike Florio a statement from Hernandez:
“I have recently learned that a comment I made about Joe Mixon on social media a few years ago is now receiving a lot of attention. I want to explain that comment and clarify that I do not believe Joe ever did anything to hurt my daughter,” Hernandez wrote.
No matter how one digests this situation, it’s a terrible turn of events for Mixon. As the PFT writers noted, evaluators had whispered behind the scenes about other problems in Mixon’s past, so something potentially coming to light in the same vein as his major red flag is bad news.
The damage might be done here. As we’ve noted recently, Mixon’s draft stock was already hovering in a precarious position. It’s hard to know how many more teams might shy away after Wednesday’s event, but few could blame more teams from removing him from boards.
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