Rooting guide for when your team drafts an alleged rapist

Potentially useful thoughts for Ravens fans; a reference for the rest of us

Welp: this wasn't what I imagined writing as the first football piece for this Substack. But we must take the world as it comes: as they say, it is what it is. Let's get to it!

Marshall edge rusher Mike Green fell to the Ravens at pick #59 in the draft. He's a prodigiously talented player. Here is tape of his first rep at the Senior Bowl practices:

Reverse-angle replay:

The offensive lineman eating it in that rep is Josh Conerly Jr, who started for top-5 Oregon the past two seasons and was drafted in the first round at Tackle. Mike Tanier shares that the first scouting note he wrote in his spiral notepad about Green at the Senior Bowl practices was, "Dear God." His last was, “Sheesh.”

Dane Brugler had Green as the #10 player in his draft guide; Mike Mayock had him at #15. Green looks like the kind of pass-rusher the Ravens haven't had a shot at in the draft since Terrell Suggs (who went #10 way back in 2003).

That's the good news. The bad news? Um:

Mike Green tells reporters at NFL combine he left Virginia after being accused of sexual assault
February 26, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/nfl-combine-mike-green-3b2637f2728dec7e89ba02956a1f79fc

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — NFL draft prospect Mike Green, a second-team All-America edge rusher, says he transferred from Virginia to Marshall after being accused of sexual assault for the second time.

Green told reporters Wednesday at the NFL scouting combine that he also was accused of sexual assault in high school, adding he was never charged and insisting he did nothing wrong.

This is why he wasn't taken in the first round; the reason why he almost made it all the way out of the second round without being drafted. As we euphemize, "off-field issues".

How do you handle it when your team drafts an alleged rapist? How do you root?
I've got you covered. I see five "stages" of maintaining your rooting interest.

1. Tell yourself it's not true.

There’s some support for this; it’s not just a stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears stance.

First off, this isn’t a story being told about Green. This is reporting from Green himself. As Tanier observed, “Green got ahead of the story.”

That’s the cynical truth; but it’s been a couple months, and there’s been no “other side of the story” as yet. Doug Farrar quotes Green at length from his time on the podium at the Combine:

Green said that the Virginia accusation was from an unknown individual, and the Lafayette accusation was eventually closed.

"At Virginia, it was an anonymous report, so no. It was nothing that came up out of it," he said. "There were no questions that had even been asked of me. Out of high school, yes, they did do their due diligence, and they ended up just closing the case."
…
"I think what everybody just needs to know is I'm not this guy that everybody's trying to portray me to be. That's just talking about something that they don't know about me."
…
"Yeah, I mean, there's accusations out there," Green said. "I've never been questioned, I've never been asked. I've never been, you know what I'm saying, like nobody ever asked me a question about what happened before I departed from Virginia. It was just accusations and that [which] caused me to leave from there.”

The Athletic reported in February that:

The Charlottesville Police Department said Thursday it was notified on Aug. 29, 2022, of an alleged sexual assault involving Green that occurred around 1 am three days prior on West Main Street in Charlottesville. There were no reported injuries nor any damaged or stolen property, according to Charlottesville Police Sgt. Chris Huber.

“The investigation of the case has been suspended,” Huber wrote in an email Thursday.
…
When asked to clarify that he was denying the accusations, Green responded, “Correct. Once again, I’ve done nothing wrong.”
…
Green spoke for nearly 20 minutes in front of reporters Wednesday. Typically in these settings, prospects choose not to address any allegations or off-field issues. Green answered each question he was asked, and clarified that there have been two allegations against him — one in high school, and an anonymous report at Virginia, he said.
…
“I’m not worried at all. … I have no concerns and I have no problem with talking to these teams about it because I know who I am and I know the truth,” he said.

I personally get suspicious when I hear that an investigation into sexual assault by a football player has been “suspended” by the police dept of a college town. Yeah, right. My default assumption is that the police and/or the head coach and/or the school flexed some muscle and got the story quashed. Maybe you feel the same way. History has provided plenty of justification for thinking that.

But:

1. If you’re going to bury a story, then (it seems to me) you don’t bring it up during your time on the podium at the NFL Combine.

2. The 2022 UVA coaching staff was brand new, had no “equity” in Green (who wasn’t any kind of star, just a rotational linebacker), and suspended him without a second thought. Do you quash a story and suspend the player?

Dane Brugler wrote in his draft guide that due to the allegation from high school, Virginia requested Green sign a zero-tolerance policy. When the second allegation came up, Virginia had a new coaching staff – Bronco Mendenhall had resigned to spend time with his family, Tony Elliott came over from Clemson – and a signed policy; they cut bait rather than invest any effort into a potential troublemaker. That makes sense for a new staff, but doesn’t necessarily give us real info about Green.

Do you find the timeline confusing? A first allegation, a coaching staff change, a second allegation, a transfer to a new school? I find it confusing. It always helps me to see things laid out. So here you go:

A Mike Green timeline
2017 High School: Lafayette HS in Williamsburg VA
2018 HS: Linebacker + Tight End; also all-state wrestler
2019 HS: allegation happened in this block of
2020 HS: years but we don't know any specifics
offseason: Green turned 18 in July of 2021
2021 UVA: Linebacker, appeared in 6 games (coach Bronco Mendenhall)
2022 UVA: suspended for 2nd allegation (new head coach Tony Elliott)
2023 Marshall: 4½ sacks, “showed flashes”
2024 Marshall: 17 sacks (led nation)

It would be nice to know what the allegation from high school was. To me, and maybe you feel the same way, there’s a spectrum of actions between – yeesh, I am not comfortable writing this – running from (at one end) a one-on-one assault with coercion, thru a Tailhook-style group bad behavior thing, thru a drunken hookup, to at the other end a consensual encounter between two under-age peers. These might all be “sexual assault” to some degree; but to me they vary in levels of individual culpability (and individual malevolence). Knowing what “kind” of thing we’re talking about would help me calibrate just how bad of a bad actor I think this kid is.

Tanier points out that we might never know: “The high school records likely involve minors and are probably sealed.” Green himself definitely was a minor; likely the other party was too.

So what do we do in the presence of all this smoke? Do we assume that there’s a roaring fire?

I don’t usually like to do that. Granted, in this instance there’s an element of motivated reasoning on my part: I would certainly prefer to believe that it didn’t happen. But it’s also true that there’s literally zero evidence to back up anything else. I’m on the “believe women” side when it comes to sexual assault allegations; but at this point there’s no woman to believe. Green himself spoke awfully confidently for a perp who knew that someone might come out of the woodwork any day to contradict him. He didn’t just read a prepared statement and sit down; he stood up there for 20 minutes and answered question after question. Either he’s a psychopath; or he’s ridiculously well-prepped in PR by his agent; or he’s sure he’s telling the truth.

The first stage of rooting is to tell yourself that the allegations aren’t true, and to cling to that as long as you can.

2. "That was years ago: he's a different guy now."

America loves a redemption story. “I've made some mistakes, but I’ve learned from them and have changed.”

Baltimore football fans in particular have been top-tier cheerleaders for a redemption arc for 25 years now. We say to ourselves, Ray Lewis was in the wrong place at the wrong time, he obstructed justice, was held to account for that and assisted the prosecution. And then he changed his ways: stopped clubbing, stopped hanging with a bad crowd, and became a role model for – well. I won’t make sweeping claims for Ray as a “role model” for living one’s life. But if we stick to the narrow field of what it takes to have a long & productive NFL career, from offseason workouts to diet to film study to prepping for game day, Ray became an expert. After about July of 2000 onward he was an absolute gold standard in that regard.

If news emerges that makes it impossible to cling to the idea that Green didn’t “do” anything, then the next stage is this: tell ourselves that Green learned from the negative events and changed his ways.

Full disclosure, I personally have a bit of a predisposition toward buying that kind of story. One of my pet ideas is that a key stage of development for many men is learning how not to be a total asshole to women. (My wife & I have a recurring argument, er, discussion about the comedian Louis CK that centers around this pet idea.)

It’s also true that this is what NFL teams – specifically the Ravens – care about: not what happened before, but what is the likelihood the player will get in trouble in the future? Green’s high school case is closed and probably sealed; the Virginia incident is either buried or didn’t really happen. So all that matters to NFL teams is, how much of a problem is this player likely to be/cause in the future?

We know how the Ravens operate. Green would have been on their scout’s radar no later than the 2023 season. The Ravens have their area scouts talk to people in the programs, from position coaches to strength coaches etc. The scouts would have been asking those people about Green from Spring football 2024 all the way thru the draft process.

Here’s Eric DeCosta & John Harbaugh answering questions about Green:

https://www.baltimoreravens.com/video/eric-decosta-on-mike-green-he-is-a-relentless-player

DECOSTA: "I would say that we investigated this situation very thoroughly. I think we have the best scouts in the NFL. We've got great scouts that go into Virginia. They go into Marshall. We've got people that work investigating different incidents with players all the time, and we felt comfortable taking [Green]. ... We understand the severity of what these allegations were, of course, but doing our due diligence, we are comfortable with Mike. I personally spent an hour and a half with him in my office, and I think the best is yet to come with him, and I'm glad we got him.
…
in Mike's case, I feel like we did a good job talking to as many people as possible. We talked to Mike at length, we did our own kind of work behind the scenes, looking at all the different things, and we felt comfortable taking him.
…
We diligently investigated it. We got as much information as we could. We considered the facts. We considered the allegations. We considered what the reports actually were, and what they actually weren't, and we made the decision based off of that."

HARBAUGH: “It was our scouts. I was in all the meetings. I heard all the reports. ... It's what they were, and what they weren't. That's just as important. And the coaches and administrators and teammates at Marshall were fully supportive of everything he had done there, and same at UVA. It wasn't any different at UVA. It was exactly the same from that standpoint, so you talk about due diligence. It was exhaustive – what these guys have done – and we made a decision based on what we felt was fair."

There’s two ideas in that quote from the Ravens brass. First their repeated phrase about what the reports (allegations?) were vs what they weren’t. That doesn’t explicitly say anything; but implicitly it conveys an impression that the specific allegations “weren’t that bad.” This brings us back to my uncomfortable “spectrum of assault” from the last section. The Ravens are suggesting to us, without coming out and actually saying so, that the allegations against Green were from the more palatable end of the spectrum.

The second idea is that, whatever Green was 3 years ago, now he’s a hard-working guy with his head on straight. DeCosta personally spent an hour-&-a-half with Green. (That’s a long-ass interview.) Marshall head coach Charles Huff said Green is “the most humble human being” you’ll ever meet, according to Dane Brugler. Brugler also says scouts got strong character feedback on Green from coaches both at Marshall and at Virginia.

Jonas Shaffer of The Baltimore Banner did some more reporting on Green:

In interviews with three coaches who’ve worked closely with Green … the coaches acknowledged the seriousness of his sexual assault allegations and his need to mature in college. They said Green has reckoned with his past and developed a more professional approach to football. And they understood why he might’ve fallen in the draft, even as they raved about his character.
…
Marshall defensive line coach Ralph Street said “And then, on top of that, he’s top one when it comes to who he is as a person. And, again, I stand on that. I spent seven years on a military base [coaching at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School]. I know about character. I know about integrity. That young man possesses all of it, all those traits.

You can see stage 2 in this quote: “reckoned with his past and developed a different approach.” Shaffer also interviewed Green’s high school coach:

Lafayette High football coach Andy Linn, who’s known Green since he was in the sixth grade, said a sexual assault allegation against Green late in his senior year led him to sign the zero-tolerance policy with Virginia. Linn called the accusation “such a minuscule thing.”

“It’s not anything that as a head football coach — and I try to deal with everything — anything I even had to deal with,” he said. Linn added: “If you want a guy who will vouch for Mike Green, I’d vouch for Mike Green 10,000 times. … He’s an unbelievable young man. He’s just a great kid who got caught in some bad circumstances...”

You can see how Linn echoes the two ideas the Ravens brass stated: Green’s a good kid now, and the actual allegations weren’t as bad as it sounds. “Such a miniscule thing.” That’s quite a remark to make on-the-record about a sexual assault allegation: yeesh! But, with the uncomfortable spectrum in mind, we can at least entertain the idea that there is conduct that is assault-y but not really all that bad.

Here’s more from Marshall’s head coach:

Huff called Green a willing mentor to teammates who “got into issues,” even if they were never as serious as sexual assault allegations.

“A lot of times, young men, they do something that’s embarrassing and they don’t like talking about it. They don’t want it brought up,” Huff said. “But Mike would stand up in front of the position room or stand up in front of the team and tell them about his story and how one decision or a group of decisions could almost ruin your career.”
Huff said Green learned to keep a smaller circle at Marshall, focusing his energy on his craft.

There’s stage 2 again, that Green learned from the incidents.

(That’s a lot of substantive quotes from the Banner. I hope they constitute “fair use”. To beef up the chances, let me just say: the two indispensable “follows” for Ravens news are Jeff Zrebiec with The Athletic and Jonas Shaffer at The Baltimore Banner. I’ve been subscribing to both outlets for some years now, and in both cases the Ravens writer, Zrebiec or Shaffer, is worth the subscription price all by himself. Zrebiec is more of a classic beat reporter, very detailed; Shaffer branches out into some other areas, like interviewing Mike Green’s old coaches or Todd Monken’s former quarterbacks for a profile. Both are absolutely indispensable.)

You can get a glimpse of how engaging Green is, even downright charming, from this interview with Titans reporters from the Senior Bowl:

He doesn’t seem like like a psychopath. I guess they never do. But there is justification for telling ourselves that, if Green showed bad judgement and got into trouble before, he has matured into humble hard-working player who will be a credit to an organization.

3. "He's innocent until proven guilty, and he deserves his day in court before we judge him.”

The idea of these stages is that they go from most acceptable to most egregious. This stage as written sounds similar to #1. The difference is, in stage #1 we think he’s innocent, and in stage #2 we think he’s remorseful and has grown & changed; but in stage #3 he did it and is skating only because they can’t prove it. No remorse.

And we accept it and continue to root for him to get sacks because of the technicality that he hasn’t been found guilty (yet) in court.

I would have trouble with this stage. I like it when I can think that there’s no substance to the Virginia allegation, and whatever happened in high school was “not that bad;” coupled with a dash of the kid learning about trouble situations and resolving to stay out of them. I’d have more trouble if there was probable-cause and potential charges looming, and the only thing I could say was hey, it’s not proven.

To me it seems a short step from this stage to:

4. Be like Browns fans

Doubtless it’s “not all Browns fans.” But there’s a swath of Browns fans that are full-throated in support of Deshaun Watson. Stage 4 of rooting when your team has drafted an alleged rapist is to embrace the misogyny, celebrate sexual assault, and just be an outright piece of shit.

Man goes viral for selling appalling Watson-themed shirt at Browns game
https://www.marca.com/en/nfl/cleveland-browns/2022/08/22/6302d871ca4741a0438b45c4.html
Aug 21, 2022

Vulgar t-shirts, posters raise questions after Cleveland Browns preseason game
https://www.wkyc.com/article/sports/nfl/browns/vulgar-t-shirts-posters-raise-questions-browns-preseason-game/95-b0692a36-4ea2-45ad-b9ac-374271cafad6
Aug 23, 2022

Nice of that fan to involve his young son in this display. Bonding.
This next is the worst one. Brace yourself:

Browns fans exemplify the word 'trashy' with bizarre and offensive Deshaun Watson shrine at tailgate
9/18/2022
https://www.marca.com/en/nfl/cleveland-browns/2022/09/19/6327add846163fee268b457c.html

Gah. For the record, they actually are illegal; but enough of that.

I’m going to skip this stage entirely. No way I can bring myself to be like the worst Browns fans. If facts emerge to move us past stages 2 & 3, then to me it’s either stop rooting for the player, or:

5. Admit that you don't care when it’s your team

Just admit that you're an asshole when it comes to sports. If the player is helping your team, then you don't care about any off-field stuff. Whether it's sexual assault, DUI, domestic violence, DUI manslaughter, accessory to murder, or outright assassination: just win, baby.

Remember the Hot/Crazy scale from that episode of How I Met Your Mother?

For this discussion, the “hot” (vertical) axis is “how good a player” and the “crazy” (horizontal) axis is “how bad a crime.”

In the case of Ray Lewis, he was way high on the vertical axis (a muti-time defensive player of the year and eventual Hall of Famer). On the horizontal axis, he obstructed justice by losing the white suit and initially refusing to “snitch” on his companions. When the scale includes domestic violence and DUI manslaughter, obstruction of justice is not very far over to the right; especially since Ray wound up cutting a deal with prosecutors and testifying. We in the general public tend to be fairly soft on people who initially resist “rolling over” on their friends. (I learned all the criminal law I know from Law & Order: Jack McCoy would threaten witnesses with that charge, but not usually bring it.) So Ray Lewis was comfortably clear of the Hot/Crazy line.

Sexual assault is further over to the right on the Hot/Crazy graph than obstruction of justice is. Which brings up an uncomfortable question I may have to ask myself at some point.

I badly want Lamar Jackson to get a Super Bowl win. I want that as bad as I’ve ever wanted anything as a sports fan. I think I want it more than I wanted Joe Flacco & John Harbaugh to get one a dozen years ago. The only thing I can think of that comes close, is how bad I yearned for Gary Williams and the Terps to get a Final Four win way back in 2002. Back then I literally knelt on the floor about 3 feet away from the TV and wrung my hands all thru that National Championship game. Two full hours. (I probably took a bathroom break at halftime, maybe tried to eat a snack.)

Do I want Lamar to get his Super Bowl so bad, that I will cheer full-throatedly for a known rapist so long as he gets enough sacks and QB pressures? I don’t know the answer to that. I hope not to have to confront it.

So where am I at right now?

Oh, I’m Stage One all the way right now. I am full-on with:

Green didn’t do it; the Virginia allegation turned out to be nothing; the thing from high school was on the palatable end along the lines of two minors being involved with each other. Maybe with just a dash of Stage Two: the Ravens scouts did their due diligence, Green is the humble young man his Marshall coach says he is; he may have been involved in some unfortunate “situations” when he was younger, but if so he has learned from that/those incident(s) to be smarter about “situations” and stay around people he knows & trusts and act right.

I’m not quite in denial about the facts (at least I don’t think so); but it’s fair to say that I’m not anywhere close to eager to learn anything different that might force me to change my stance. (Looking askance at you, Baltimore Banner.)

Coming Up:

The next two football pieces I plan for this Substack are, (1) the three or four paths the Ravens had on draft day to get to the Super Bowl, and (2) a new stat for rating players at the “skill” positions (or fantasy positions).
There also might be a piece on the first month or so of the Buzz Williams era for Maryland basketball.