Continued from yesterday, Part II begins with the last few paragraphs from Part I for context.
Pacman’s latest run-in with the law was nothing compared to the surveillance video that captured the 6-foot-1-inch, 226-pound Mixon during college laying out a woman with a vicious right cross, causing her to fall face-first into a table, breaking her jaw and other bones in her face. Here’s how Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis addressed the situation during a post-draft press conference:
“I don’t know who isn’t disgusted at what they saw,” Lewis said. “But that’s one day in the young man’s life. He’s had to live that since then. He will continue to have to live that. And he gets an opportunity to move forward and write a script from there on.”
The move drew heavy criticism from local media — a news station even called for a boycott of the team. Longtime Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty wrote that seeing Bengals all-time great Anthony Munoz announce the Mixon pick made him feel like crying.
“The Bengals have forfeited any and all rights to the word ‘character’ as a descriptive,” Daugherty wrote. “They have lost all remaining sympathy from anyone who still believed Cincinnati’s miscreants were no different than any other team’s miscreants.”
For She FF, the Mixon situation was just another in a long line of hypocrisies they’d witnessed during their years as football fans. And it’s not like things had been changing quickly — another dozen players have been arrested for domestic violence, battery or sexual battery since Hardy’s arrest in 2015, according to a USA Today database of NFL arrests.
“I think it was just so many things compounding,” says Bauerle, the reigning champ who is also a designer at a branding agency in downtown Cincinnati. “We’re not stupid — obviously the NFL is a business and we get that if they’re courting women it’s just to increase their viewership. But sometimes I just wish the NFL could be smarter about it.”
Like most fantasy leagues, She FF is more of a social space than a cut-throat competition — a way for friends, family members and co-workers to stay connected as people grow up, build families and drift apart over time. One of She FF’s participants lives in Denver. Another just had twins. Most take part in an all-female lake trip every year.
“I think the conclusion we ended up with,” Purnell says, “was that keeping a group of women hanging out together was important.”
Instead of folding up their social space and giving up on the NFL, Fielding set about creating a list of “undraftable” players. Any player implicated in a situation involving violence against women, convicted or not, would be formally added to a Google spreadsheet — along with his position, charge and number of arrests — and banned from ownership in the league.
USA Today’s handy database of NFL player arrests was a good place to start. The website currently details 876 arrests dating back to 2000, searchable by year, team or position. Depending on when you click the link, it’s likely to be higher. (It rose by five during the course of this reporting.)
A quick scroll reveals the details of lesser crimes like violating court orders and eluding police, along with the more heinous: assault, battery, domestic violence and sexual assault — even a handful of murder charges.
Compiling the undraftables was more daunting than Fielding expected. Defensive players abound in the database, but She FF doesn’t use individual defensive players. Fielding considered scrapping the team defense position but decided not to go that far.
“It got a little sticky because not all of those were confirmed and some were just charges, not necessarily convictions,” she says.
But commissioner Fielding, like Goodell, wields unilateral power over the players, and she ended up banning a total of 11. She then posted the spreadsheet in the league Facebook group, accompanied by the following note: “Here is our list of shame. I limited this list to active, offensive players. USA Today has a running list of all NFL arrests. Don’t look it up. It’s depressing.”
• • •
Because the league was renewed so late, She FF moved to an online draft for the first time, which was kind of a bummer. No pool party or 10th-round plunge. No old-school draft board or color-coded stickers. No cigarettes dangling from the mouths of intensely focused managers.
Nevertheless, the draft on Sept. 1 went as well as could be expected considering the unfamiliar format and the collection of alleged criminals on everyone’s minds. But the online draft room made it somewhat difficult to respect the undraftables list as the pace picked up.
“Autodraft kept putting people up who were on the list,” Fielding says. “The next pick would be Tyreek Hill or Ben Roethlisberger and we’d have to go back and stop the draft and redo it.”
The first pick — and the right to draft dynamic Arizona Cardinals running back David Johnson — went to Dana Burns’ team, My Ball Zach Ertz. Bauerle’s Mystic Farts scored the second pick and selected Pittsburgh’s Le’Veon Bell. Kelly Kampsen chose hometown guy A.J. Green to start her Turd Ferguson squad. Carley Manning’s team, MagnificentBush, and Fielding’s team, Ginger kids have no Sproles, rounded out the first round with Atlanta’s Devonta Freeman and Tennessee’s DeMarco Murray, respectively.
Things were rolling along for She FF through the end of September, aside from a few early-season pickups of banned players.
“I had to call a couple people out and say, ‘Hey you have to drop this dude,’” Fielding says. “By Week 4 we kind of all had our shit together.”
Then on Thursday, Oct. 5, The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story, detailing decades of alleged sexual assault by the Hollywood mogul. Subsequent reporting on the likes of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and Louis C.K. shined a light on the extent of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace. Even the NFL Network, which is owned by the league, just last week suspended three former players working as analysts after a former female staffer filed a lawsuit accusing them and a producer of sexual harassment.
The downfall of these powerful men — and others in top positions from government to media to business — was a welcome change for women used to seeing such indiscretions shrugged off. It made their symbolic stand against the NFL all the more meaningful.
“I think that what’s happening right now in pop culture and in the world of politics is part of the reason that we’ll keep doing it,” Purnell says. “Because finally there’s a moment where it’s public, and I know that sounds really trite but it just felt so hopeless there for a minute. Now that there’s a national conversation, it’s like, ‘OK. Maybe I don’t have to give up everything that I love just because the world is awful.’”
Instances of sexual assault and violence against women are well-documented and pervasive, especially in the workplace. Recent reporting has depicted the barriers women face in reporting sexual harassment and abuse, from top Hollywood actresses to women working in restaurants.
The statistics paint a dire picture: One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the country’s largest anti-sexual violence organization. Twelve percent of sexual assault survivors were working at the time of the assault. Only six out of every 1,000 perpetrators of sexual assault end up in prison, according to RAINN.
The national conversation about these issues has given women hope that things could change for the better, however conflicted they might be about football.
“I’ve read a bunch of articles about people feeling similar,” Bauerle says. “You have to keep talking about it. These rules help you to be aware of it — have it on your mind and talk to other people about it.”
Discussing their rule changes and the planned donation to the nonprofit prompted Purnell’s husband’s league to also donate a portion of its league fees to a women’s charity.
“That’s kind of cool,” Purnell says. “That sort of keeps us going, like a sense of purpose — having a conversation and making other people aware that you can be a football fan and also a feminist.”
Last week, seven of the league’s 12 members gathered at a swanky sports bar in Covington, Kentucky, just a stone’s throw from Paul Brown Stadium on the other side of the Ohio River. Amid day drinks, the Bengals’ meltdown against the Vikings and at least one conversation about anxiety manifesting itself as rage during one’s 30s — a downer subject but apropos for these times and this group — it was the league’s blue bloods who advanced to the She FF finals.
This weekend, Bauerle and Purnell will face off for the title of Miss She FF 2017. Either the two-time defending champion Baurle will retain her crown or Purnell will reclaim it, representing her third overall championship. Surprisingly, these two have never squared off in the Super Bowl.
“Send good vibes,” Purnell says. “She’s ruthless.”
A version of this story first appeared in Cincinnati CityBeat. Danny Cross is the editor of CityBeat and a contributor to Creativesports.com. Read “Cross Reference” in this space every Friday. Illustration by Julie Hill, photos by Hailey Bollinger.
