It’s not quite accurate to say times at Baylor football have gone from bad to worse. They certainly have, however, gone from bad to many multiples of bad. We have known for more than year now that head coach Art Briles has been running a program that plays it loose on the field and perhaps off the field as well when it comes to allegations against his players. Earlier this week, ESPN’s Outside The Lines report made it clear that problem exists in many more cases than we previously imagined.
Baylor Football Has Many Questions To Answer
What we now know, if we are to believe the sources at OTL, (a generally credible reporting outlet), is that since 2009 the number of sexual assault allegations against football players is at least nine. Let that sink in for a moment. On at least nine different occasions, Briles, the athletic administration and the school administration have been advised that there are serious allegations regarding women and Baylor football players.
Sam Ukwuachu was at the center of this growing storm last summer. The defensive end transferred to Baylor in 2013 after being kicked off the team at Boise State. Later that year, he was accused of sexually assaulting a Baylor women’s soccer player. He did not play for Baylor after the accusations but was allowed to stay in school during his legal process. Last summer he was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to six months in county jail and 10 years of felony probation. The victim in the case filed a Title IX lawsuit alleging the school knew Ukwuachu had a violent past, yet by letting him on the football team, did not protect the female students on campus. The story became a hot topic in coaching circles as former Boise State coach Chris Petersen claimed he had warned Briles about the player. Briles denied Petersen’s assertion.
Former Baylor defensive end Tevin Elliot is in year two of a 20 year prison sentence after being found guilty of two counts of sexually assaulting a freshman twice in the same night in 2012. There were others who made allegations against Elliot, but they either did not testify or the cases were dropped. Baylor has been hit with a Title IX lawsuit here as well, for allegedly not investigating all of the claims against Elliot. While the legal proceedings were going on and he had yet to be found guilty, he was allowed to stay in school, including being in a class with one of the alleged victims. The lawsuit claims the school knew there were repeated allegations against Elliot, but did not look into them and thus failed to protect the women on campus.
Those are the two players that were investigated, tried and convicted. But the allegations run much deeper. The ESPN story, along with previous reports from news outlets allege that the school has a history of turning a deaf ear to women who have registered complaints against Baylor football players. There are allegations that the campus police have been allowed to ride shotgun on Waco sheriff’s department investigations if they involved a Baylor football player, even when the alleged crime took place off campus, out of the jurisdiction of Baylor law enforcement. There are assertions that football and/or school officials have been called first when a player is arrested.
Some of this has a paper trail and some has not risen above the level of allegation to this point, but they raise obvious concerns. Baylor hired Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton to run an internal investigation into the school, the athletic department and the football program. The school’s Board of Regents received a preliminary copy of the report last week, none of which has been made public. The report is also under review by university president Ken Starr; yes, the same Ken Starr who was a special prosecutor in the 1990’s investigating the personal dalliances of President Bill Clinton. In an interview with the Fort Worth Star Telegram last month, Starr said he expected his people to, “Stand up and take your medicine if you made a mistake.”
The question becomes what that medicine is, who doles it out and who takes it. My social media pages blew up last night with discussions from those demanding that Baylor stop playing football immediately to those who continue to back Briles and his team. If the football program does suffer punishment in some form, who delivers it? As I unpopularly proclaimed when it came to the Penn State story, this is no place for the NCAA to get involved. We are not talking about players getting cash payments or free food from a local diner. We are talking about alleged criminal activity from players, potential cover-up by athletic administrators, coaches and perhaps school administrators. We are talking about Title IX lawsuits that will be heard in federal court. We are talking about the possibility that we are not done seeing current or former players in handcuffs. Putting the NCAA and its woefully sparse team of investigators into this is like letting the mall cop investigate the jewelry store heist after the FBI and CSI labs have already dusted for finger prints and named suspects.
This goes beyond NCAA probation or bans from bowl games. The faithful in Waco want to back Briles. Over eight years, he has taken a bottom feeding program and turned it into a regular playoff contender. But at what cost? The program has more question marks than it does defensive linemen. Do they go through training camp and into the season as though nothing has changed? Does everyone just stay in place in the football program? In the athletic department? In the president’s office? Doesn’t someone have to pay the price for a program run amok?
It has become routine in the sports media world to discover the misdeeds of college athletes. With social media outlets at such high availability, it is much harder for the adults in charge to sweep them under the rug. Some of the transgressions are merely a case of immature, coddled athletes thinking they can get away with more. Then there are some that make you ask where the adults were; where were the people who were supposed to be growing, nurturing and even parentally punishing the young athletes even if it means giving up your precious win-loss record and bowl appearance money. The athletes need to be held accountable and so do some of the grown-ups who were hired to mind the family.
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