Seattle signs Joe Mixon to its practice squad to bolster the running game as city taxes rise five times faster than the population and place an increasing burden on businesses.
The Seahawks Give Joe Mixon One Last Chance: Desperate Move or Hidden Ace?
The Seattle Seahawks have reached the point where they must grasp at any available lifeline—and that lifeline is Joe Mixon. On Monday, the club signed the 30-year-old veteran after a brief workout, a move that looks both logical and risky. Logical because the team’s backfield is quite literally falling apart before its eyes. Risky because Mixon did not play at all in 2025 while recovering from a serious foot injury, and his name has long been associated not only with athletic accomplishments but also with a string of high-profile off-field controversies.
The situation in Seattle’s backfield is genuinely critical. Even after beating the Chargers 30–23 in Week 4 to improve to 3–1, the coaching staff understands that this cannot continue for long. Kenneth Walker III, the Super Bowl MVP, left the team in free agency, while first-round rookie Jadarian Price landed on injured reserve. In essence, Seattle’s running game needs an urgent reboot, and Mixon represents an attempt to fill the gap with a proven, if battered, veteran.
For Mixon himself, this comeback is akin to a leap into the unknown. After the 2024 season with the Houston Texans, during which he rushed for 1,016 yards and 11 touchdowns in 14 games and earned the second Pro Bowl selection of his career, he suffered a serious foot injury that sidelined him for the entire following year. Now he must begin on the practice squad—a kind of quarantine period for a player trying to regain his form. In today’s NFL, where youth and speed are prized, a 30-year-old running back coming off a year-long absence is a difficult commodity to sell. Add in his extensive off-field record, and the challenge becomes considerably more complicated.
Those incidents date back to college. In 2014, a video emerged showing Mixon striking University of Oklahoma student Amelia Molitor, breaking four bones in her face. The university suspended him for a season. Mixon later entered what is known as an Alford plea—a legal mechanism under which the defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges that prosecutors have sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction. He was ordered to complete 100 hours of community service. Several NFL teams reportedly removed him from their draft boards, but the Cincinnati Bengals still selected him in the second round in 2017. Legal headlines continued to follow him during his professional career. In 2023, he was charged with aggravated menacing in connection with a road-rage incident in Cincinnati, but a judge acquitted him. Separately, in March 2023, a teenager playing Nerf near Mixon’s home was shot by his sister’s boyfriend. Authorities did not charge Mixon himself, but the victim’s family filed a lawsuit against him and the alleged shooter. The lawsuit was settled in 2025.
Yet when Mixon is on the field, he reminds everyone of his value. During seven seasons in Cincinnati, he led the AFC in rushing in 2018 with 1,168 yards, earned his first Pro Bowl selection in 2021, and helped the Bengals reach Super Bowl LVI. In that game, he even threw a six-yard touchdown pass to Tee Higgins. In 2024, he proved he still had plenty to offer by finishing as Houston’s second-leading performer.
Now Seattle is betting that Mixon still has enough left in the tank to add muscle and experience to an injury-depleted backfield. This is a classic case in which sporting necessity outweighs reputational risk. The Seahawks are not signing him to a large contract or a long-term deal—they are giving him an opportunity beginning on the practice squad. If he returns to form, the club will gain a powerful running back capable of carrying the workload and serving as a leader for younger players. If not, it will be a short-lived experiment with no serious financial consequences. For Mixon, however, this may truly be his final chance to prove that he can help a team rather than simply generate headlines. The only question is whether he has enough health, time and, most importantly, discipline to stay out of trouble. Seattle clearly hopes he does; otherwise, it would not have taken a chance on a player whose name has long been synonymous with the phrase “difficult character.”
The Seahawks Bring Joe Mixon Back: Former Pro Bowler to Start on Practice Squad
The Seattle Seahawks continue to strengthen their offense and are preparing to sign running back Joe Mixon. Head coach Mike Macdonald announced the move Monday, adding that the club is currently “going through the necessary procedures” to finalize the deal. According to NFL Network insider Mike Garafolo and ESPN reporter Adam Schefter, Mixon will begin working on the practice squad after passing his physical, meaning he will not initially join the active roster. The 30-year-old running back previously worked out for the Seahawks, and the club’s leadership evidently liked what it saw.
For Seattle, this is another attempt to strengthen the running back position. The team is clearly seeking additional offensive options and is willing to take a chance on a player with significant experience but equally serious health concerns. Mixon is no random newcomer to the league. Across eight NFL seasons, he has rushed for 7,429 yards, added 2,448 receiving yards and scored 74 total touchdowns. Those are the numbers of a player who was a central figure in the Cincinnati Bengals’ offense for years, surpassing 1,000 rushing yards in four consecutive seasons.
His most recent season, however, was unsuccessful. Mixon missed the entire 2025 campaign because of a foot injury, and in March the Houston Texans, for whom he had played, decided to part ways with him. Notably, his only year in Houston was highly productive: he made the Pro Bowl for the first time in his career and surpassed 1,000 rushing yards for the fifth time. In other words, even at an age considered advanced for a running back, he performed at a high level when healthy.
Here is what the key terminology means. The practice squad is essentially a team’s reserve list. Its players practice with the main roster but do not occupy a spot on the 53-man active roster and earn less money. They can be elevated to the active roster at any time if a key player is injured or the team wants to change its strategy. For Mixon, this creates an opportunity to gradually regain his form after a long layoff without immediately adding significant pressure to the club’s payroll. For Seattle, it is a low-risk move: if the veteran recovers and returns to his previous level, the team gains an almost cost-free reinforcement; if not, the losses are minimal.
The key insight is that the Seahawks are not simply signing another running back—they are testing whether Mixon can return to a Pro Bowl level after a foot injury that cost him an entire season. If he can, Seattle gains a proven player who can both run the ball and catch passes out of the backfield. If he cannot, the club loses almost nothing. As NFL.com reports, the deal has not yet been finalized and remains contingent on a physical, meaning the situation should become clear soon. For Mixon, this is probably his last serious opportunity to prove that being 30 and missing a season does not yet mean the end of his career.
Seattle’s Tax Burden Is Rising Five Times Faster Than Its Population
According to a new study commissioned by the Downtown Seattle Association and the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the city’s tax collections rose from $900 million in 2013 to $2.8 billion in 2026, with businesses bearing most of the burden. Analysts at ECONorthwest calculated that taxes increased by 172 percent over the decade, while the population grew by only 31 percent and employment by 23 percent. In other words, taxes grew 5.6 times faster than the number of residents and 7.5 times faster than the number of jobs, making Seattle one of the clearest examples of how municipal budgets attempt to balance themselves by narrowing the tax base.
The report’s key conclusion, as reported by FOX 13 Seattle, is that businesses’ share of the city’s tax revenue rose from approximately 55 percent in 2016 to 68 percent in 2026, or about $1.65 billion. Particularly troubling is the fact that new taxes—the payroll tax introduced in 2021, the social housing tax approved in 2025 and the B&O increase under the Seattle Shield program in 2026—fall on an extremely narrow group of taxpayers. Fewer than 500 companies pay the payroll tax, with the 10 largest accounting for 73 percent of collections and the top 100 responsible for 93 percent. The situation is similar with the social housing tax: roughly 220 taxpayers contribute, with 10 providing 66 percent and 50 supplying 90 percent of the revenue. Together, these two taxes generated approximately $520.9 million in 2025. Because the lists of major taxpayers overlap, fewer than 20 companies account for roughly $356 million in annual city revenue.
This concentration creates a structural vulnerability that the report’s authors describe with the phrase, “the tax base is no longer growing alongside what it taxes.” Downtown Seattle Association President Jon Scholes called the system “a bad deal for Seattle,” arguing that it drives away jobs and investment. According to Scholes, high vacancy rates and declining employment downtown have led to a substantial drop in commercial property values, meaning “someone else is paying the bill.” This closes a vicious circle: the less business there is, the greater the burden on those that remain, which in turn encourages further departures by companies and employees.
The employment data also deserves attention. ECONorthwest estimates that Seattle lost approximately 18,000 jobs in the year ending in March 2025, and about 24,000 between March 2020 and March 2025, while the rest of King County added roughly 21,000. The report carefully notes that it does not establish a direct causal relationship between taxes and job losses; it only shows that tax collections and employment began moving in different directions after the payroll tax was introduced. In addition, the figures do not account for layoffs announced by Amazon, Microsoft and Meta in 2025 and 2026, making the outlook even more uncertain.
The trend in the tax burden per worker is also revealing. In 2026, the city collected approximately $2,700 in business taxes per employed person, compared with $959 in non-business tax revenue per resident. The ratio between those figures rose from 1.5 times in 2012 to 2.8 times in 2026. The report separately notes that the B&O increase accounted for $91 million of the $118 million increase in business taxes in 2026. It emphasizes that the $959 figure should not be interpreted as the amount paid by every individual resident—it is an average that nevertheless demonstrates the shift in the balance.
Moving beyond the dry figures, the picture looks like this: in recent years, Seattle built its budget around several major corporations whose revenues and staffing levels are themselves volatile and sensitive to economic cycles. The pandemic, the mass shift to remote work, rising office vacancies and technology-sector layoffs hit precisely the part of the economy that generates most new tax revenue. As a result, the city now faces a situation in which preserving service levels requires either raising rates or finding new revenue sources, and both options increase pressure on the business climate. The report’s authors write directly that the tax system was designed around economic growth, but growth has slowed while the tax burden continues to rise. That is the central paradox: the base that should expand with the economy is shrinking while rates increase. The report’s final conclusion is cautious—it does not claim that taxes caused the loss of jobs, but it identifies a dangerous divergence between the fiscal burden and actual business activity, which for any city is a signal that its strategy needs to be reconsidered.
