NFL Notes: Joe Mixon, Bears, Browns, Cardinals

Joe Mixon

Joe Mixon mentioned Friday that he’s “thankful and very honored to be a part of — to be a Cincinnati Bengal.”

“You know, I am still sitting here crying. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” Mixon said, via ESPN.com. “You know, I am thankful and very honored to be a part of — to be a Cincinnati Bengal.”

Mixon explained that all that has transpired after he punched a female Oklahoma student in the face a few years ago has changed him a lot as a person.

“It changed me a lot as a person, the way you think, the way you carry yourself, go about things,” Mixon said. “I’m going to continue to keep doing the right thing around the community, on and off the field. And I’m going to prove to them why they kept me. Leaving from Oklahoma, I still have their name, at the end of the day. I’m going to do whatever I can to make them proud and make them happy. I’m looking forward to doing that with the Cincinnati Bengals as well.”

Bengals HC Marvin Lewis mentioned that they’ve done extensive work on Mixon.

“We’ve done a lot of work. I had no idea when we went into this process anything that had occurred three years ago,” said Lewis. “For me, it was from the ground up, every single detail, every single aspect of it.

“I don’t know who isn’t disgusted with what they saw. But that’s one day in a young man’s life, and he’s had to live that since then and he will continue to have to live that, and he gets an opportunity to move forward and write his script from then on. It’s come to a conclusion with the young lady. They’ve come to their statements, her statement about how they both could’ve handled the day better. But again, that doesn’t change it.”

Bears

Bears GM Ryan Pace called the report that they didn’t inform HC John Fox of their decision to trade up for QB Mitch Trubisky until hours before they actually made the pick “false.”

“That stuff is so false,” Pace said, via Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. “There’s consistency in everything we do, so we all work arm-in-arm and that’s the way it is and that’s the way it should be.

“John is involved in every decision deeply. The respect I have for John is enormous, especially his experience and all of the players that he’s been with. I think if you look back — and we talked about this — I think a lot of it was kept secret I thought we did a good job keeping this thing pretty under wraps, it’s so sensitive. But if you go back to the private workouts that we had, I mean John and I — it’s pretty hard to hide him — but we’re traveling to Chapel Hill and having dinners and workouts with Mitch, so he’s been deeply involved from the very beginning.”

Browns

• Adam Schefter reports that with the Browns using a second-round pick on Notre Dame QB DeShone Kizer, it essentially ends andy talk of the team trading for Patriots backup QB Jimmy Garoppolo or Bengals backup A.J. McCarron this offseason.

Cardinals

Many thought the Cardinals were going to take a quarterback early in this year’s draft, but teams wound up trading ahead of them in round one and Arizona ultimately went in a different direction in round two.

Cardinals GM Steve Keim explained that while they would have liked to get a quarterback, they weren’t going to leave better players on the board.

“Would you love to find one? Absolutely,” Keim said, via ESPN.com. “But at the same time you can’t force the pick and you can’t leave better players on the board, and that is what we would’ve done if we didn’t take the approach that we did. We will continue to build this roster the right way.

“It would be a disservice to the organization and everybody that works here if we would press and do something that was out of the norm or to panic, when all along the last four years, for the most part we have made the right decisions.”