Bob Stoops Would Do Things A Bit Differently Now
21 Dec, 2016
For the first time since it became public, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops addressed the surveillance tape showing Sooners running back Joe Mixon punching a female student in 2014, and he said that if it happened now, he would dismiss Mixon from the team.
“Two and a half years ago, thought we had a significant penalty, a strong penalty,” Stoops said Wednesday. “Now, it isn’t enough. These individuals can’t have a second chance. Just not acceptable. And they know it anymore, and they’ve been told enough. We have more meetings and things of that nature that instruct and let them know what appropriate behavior is and isn’t and what the consequences are.
“Dismissal is really the only thing that is possible. A young guy having an opportunity to rehabilitate and to have some kind of discipline and come back from it is really not there anymore. Hopefully that message goes down even to the high school level that these things are just unacceptable to any degree and there’s no recovering, I guess … it never has been acceptable. What I’m saying is, there’s no recovering from these incidents really anymore.”
Stoops has been criticized for allowing Mixon to rejoin the Sooners following a one-season suspension after he fractured four bones in Oklahoma student Amelia Molitor’s face. Stoops first watched the surveillance video with university president David Boren and athletic director Joe Castiglione at the Cleveland County District Attorney’s office, shortly after the incident occurred.
“It was horrible,” Stoops said. “I hated it. I hated it as much as anybody did, absolutely.”
Asked if he felt allowing Mixon to remain at Oklahoma implicitly condoned violence against women, Stoops said he was “sure to some degree it does.”
“And I regret that,” Stoops said. “In the end, at the time, we felt it was a significant and strong punishment. And again, some people that have seen the entire video at that time agreed. And others didn’t. I understand that, and I always knew that that was something that everybody would debate.”
Stoops pointed out that he wished the surveillance tape had been released at the time of the incident and that he never anticipated that it would take so long for the video to become public.
The city of Norman had shielded the surveillance video from the public since the incident, prompting a lawsuit from the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters. Earlier this month, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in favor of the broadcasters and ordered Norman to release the tape under Oklahoma’s Open Records Act. The city had until Dec. 26 to release the video or file an appeal. Preemptively, Mixon’s attorneys released the tape, as they continue to fight a civil suit from Molitor.
Asked how he felt about the video being connected to his legacy and to his football program, Stoops said: “That’s part of it. I knew that 2½ years ago. But in the end, it’s easy to just dismiss it or remove a guy and head on down the road. In the end too, maybe I have too strong a commitment to these guys I recruit. I believe in them, and I believed at that time a young 18-year-old deserved an opportunity to redeem himself and someday possibly be forgiven. And if that can’t happen, that can’t happen. But that was the intent.”
Stoops acknowledged why critics have suggested that Mixon got a second chance at Oklahoma only because he was the top-rated recruit in the Sooners’ 2014 recruiting class. Mixon has since gone on to become one of the top players on the team. He finished the 2016 regular season ranked second in the country in all-purpose yards and was a first-team All-Big 12 selection.
“I understand where people come with that,” Stoops said. “But let’s remember that he had not played a down here when this all occurred. We’ve had plenty of four- and five-star guys not amount to a whole lot here through the years. In the end, I understand where people come with that, but I believe in these young men we recruit, maybe to a fault to some degree. I believe most coaches do. But again, here we are 2½ years later and you can’t really do that anymore.”
Despite that, Stoops said he hopes Mixon can speak about what happened soon. Mixon has yet to talk publicly about the punch. In fact, he has done only one interview at Oklahoma, in which he declined to answer any questions related to the incident.
“Joe wants to do that, and I believe that will come,” Stoops said. “Again, now that all the other issues, civil issues, seem to be cleared up, he wants to do that. He needs to do that.
“People haven’t been able to see what Joe as a person is really like. So hopefully we can start to move in that direction.”
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