WACO, Texas — Baylor coach Jim Grobe leads the team prayer in a spacious locker room before his first pregame speech since 2013. It takes 15 seconds.
"Play for each other, don’t do anything — don't do anything — that wouldn’t bring honor to your teammates," Grobe said as his voice ticked up. "That’s the key."
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That 15 seconds doesn’t erase the three-month aftermath of the school's mishandling of sexual assault allegations that led to the firing of Art Briles, who compiled a 65-37 record over nine seasons. As each grotesque detail comes to light, Baylor takes another punch via social media, and for one sole reason: The Bears didn’t do enough for those nameless victims.
Grobe is trying to help make sure it doesn't happen again. Football is a part of that process. Before leaving the locker room before the opener against Northwestern State, the players make quick break of their own: "One-two-three ... BIG 12 CHAMPS!"
Those same players would sprint by a white concrete slab at McLane Stadium with deep green lettering: “Big 12 Champions 2013 2014." Those two years brought the program intoxicating levels of success, but they came with a cost. Baylor’s players, coaches, administrators and fans are still coming to grips with that, and Grobe has the unenviable task of cleaning that mess up while maintaining that football program.
Baylor did too many things that didn't honor the university, community and football program. Can they ever bring that honor back?
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David Fankhauser graduated from Baylor in 2010. He’s a contributor for the fan blog Our Daily Bears, and he’s struggling to put into words how those last three months felt. He pauses at times. He still feels the shock of Briles' firing and everything after.
“I’ve had a hard time on the blog,” Fankhauser said. “Where do we defend Baylor, and how do we own it?”
Fankhauser loves Baylor, but the two-part question stands. He’s tailgating with friends Wesley Dunlap and Jordan Sakakeeny in 90-degree heat four hours before kickoff. It’s about trying to find the middle ground with the mix of pride and embarrassment that football success brought to a Baptist university that won 10 games once before Briles’ arrival.
The Bears won 50 games over the past five seasons. It felt good. Fankhauser and Sakakeeny kid Dunlap for not being there the night Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III led the Bears to a win against No. 5 Oklahoma at the old Floyd Casey Stadium. They watched the rise of the program from the bottom to the top of the Big 12. They welcomed McLane Stadium, a magnificent $260 million structure that overlooks the Brazos River. They saw the upgrades in downtown Waco.
Baylor became the high-scoring, it-program with slick uniforms that won back-to-back Big 12 titles. Baylor was the coolest school among the dozen FBS programs in Texas.
They also watched it all unravel in a little more than year. There was the 2014 conviction of Tevin Elliott on two counts of sexual assault, which later led to a lawsuit. There was the high-profile Sam Ukwuachu case, in which Briles allegedly brought on the Boise State transfer despite knowing his history of violence toward women, only to have him found guilty in 2015 of sexual assault on a Baylor student. That led to the discovery that 2013 accusations of sexual assault against two football players, Tre'Von Armstead and Shamycheal Chatman, were not investigated until September 2015.
In April 2016, All-American defensive end Shawn Oakman was arrested on sexual assault charges, and it wasn't the first time he'd been accused while at the school. The school-commissioned investigation by law firm Pepper Hamilton and its finding captured all that, and as details continue to surface the question of whether the school will face further punishment continues.
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Grobe is finding out how tough it can be to coach in that environment. A video surfaced of wide receiver Ishmael Zamora viciously beating a dog. None of that had anything to do with those incidents under Briles, but the questions about Baylor's culture persist. Those are questions Grobe struggled to answer at Big 12 Media Day. He also chooses his words carefully.
"I'm a football coach, I like to do football stuff and I don't like to deal with a lot of the off-the-field stuff I've been dealing with," Grobe said. "The majority of the kids had nothing to do with the problems we've faced over the last three months off the field."
The post-Briles era comes with labels. Baylor is the latest FBS-program-gone-bad, but in this age of heightened consciousness about social issues, it will never be looked at with the same bad-boy reverence as “The U” or “Pony Express.” They take turns defending the school while acknowledging what went wrong. They don’t want to be compared to Penn State, even if that comparison is out there. All that adds up to a stranger-than-usual feeling.
"It took a lot longer to get excited," Dunlap said. "There were Title IX problems that needed addressed. The focus and the easy focus is football, but there are other problems that need to be addressed."
Fankhauser, Dunlap and Sakakeeny aren’t sure how they’ll feel when Baylor takes the field, but they’ll be there.
"Today is kind of a catharsis for everybody at Baylor," Fankhauser said. "We’re starting from scratch today, and it’s going to take time. That's the one thing I’ve been trying to tell people."
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Kelly Ongena asks to borrow a cup from Fankhauser’s tailgate. She’s sitting with fellow Baylor graduates Hillary Smith and Megan Leitch and their friend Laurel Roenbrook. It’s an uncomfortable conversation when asked about how your school mishandled sexual assaults. How do you respect the victims while showing pride in your school?
Every word comes out slowly.
"It's a really bad thing that happened,” Ongena said. "We can’t make mistakes, but we need to move on."
"I hope other colleges like Baylor learn from this terrible mistake," Smith chimes in.
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They reiterate how bad they feel for those victims multiple times but at the same time say they always felt safe on campus. They enjoyed that time at Baylor, which happened to coincide with the football team’s heyday. More restaurants popped up downtown. They wanted to come back for the opener to have a good time. It’s like the billboard reads a few miles from the stadium: "Welcome Home, Baylor Family."
Ongena put it out there, too. Baylor did what countless high schools do in the football-crazy state. That's part of the identity.
"Baylor tried for a long time tried to resist not having a good football team," Ongena said. "We tried to make our mark. This is Texas. You have to have a good football team."
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Holly Grobe, wearing a dark green shirt with sleeves rolled up, has been around football her whole life. She sat in her fifth-floor suite during pregame. She could have convinced Jim to stick with retirement in the comforts of Lake Oconee in Reynolds, Ga. He coached for almost 40 years before retiring from Wake Forest in 2013. Yet that speakerphone call with former Baylor coach Grant Teaff helped pull her back in.
“I could hear it,” she said. “I heard the devastation in his voice, because he loves Baylor. He’d been the head coach here for many years, and he was heartbroken. We wanted to help.”
She saw that, then saw her two sons — Matthew and Ben — at the house for a Memorial Day cookout. They were excited. For Jim Grobe, it was a chance to get back in coaching. Not that the last three months has been easy. Grobe was criticized for an awkward news conference at Big 12 Media Day in which he tried to find the right words about the culture. The Zamora incident amplified that.
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Holly sees that criticism on message boards and social media. That’s a struggle knowing they didn’t have to come here.
“It’s not pleasant,” she said. “That’s the society we live in now. Social media is instant, so everything is out there quickly, and everybody can voice an opinion.”
Yet that's what they chose to do. The Grobes live on campus and take walks together every morning, and they are seeing and talking with female students. They have spent more time behind the scenes addressing off-field issues the last two months. She then answers the question everyone has asked in the aftermath.
“I just feel like it’s a great environment,” she said. “I would send my daughter here.”
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Baylor deputy athletic director Todd Patulski peers over the sideline trying to get a better look at Terence Williams’ touchdown run. He interviewed Grobe after Teaff’s phone call, and he’s part of an administration that’s been overhauled in the aftermath and is still figuring out its new process.
Briles is gone. Baylor president Ken Starr resigned. Mack Rhoades is the new athletic director. For Baylor, the nebulous specter of further punishment looms.
“One of the things that has been tough for the critics on social media is just being patient,” Patulski said. “Let us go through what we think is the right process so we can make the right decisions. That’s been the hard part. We’ve learned to do it the right way.”
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Patulski watches that lead push to double-digits a few minutes later before offering the difficult corner the university is in now.
“When you are in heat of the situation you tend not say anything,” Patulski said. “We just haven’t said anything. That’s been the toughest thing. The entire university is committed to get these things right and show that we’re serious. It’s unacceptable to put our university in this situation. We’re better than that.”
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Seth Russell throws four TDs in his return. The rout is on, and there’s a moment for laughter in the press box. Ben Grobe, an assistant coach at Charlotte, made the trip with his wife Nicole on Friday morning. Holly texts her other son Matthew. None of them expected to be here on opening weekend, but Ben looks at Holly, who relaxes in her seat. This is family time.
Ben played for his dad at the first head coaching stop at Ohio, and he says something to Holly that hits when Baylor takes a 48-0 lead before halftime.
“He deserves this, you know,” Grobe said.
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Soon the Grobes have a visitor. Donell Teaff, Grant’s wife, and they move over to the Teaff’s box for a while in the second half. The couples met as part of the American Football Coaches Association, and that’s a relationship Baylor is counting on to help clean up the program. Grant Teaff points to the uproar over Zamora’s three-game suspension as an example.
“What you had to do — and this is what Jim was able to do — was separate what happened with what now took place,” Teaff said. “A lot of people wanted to get rid of him, but the university did the right thing. If he fails, he fails.”
What about the rest of the football program? Teaff is placing confidence in that phone call with Grobe. That led to a 55-7 victory in the opener, but that’s secondary.
“It’s not about those who are not here, it’s about those that are here,” Teaff said. “People just can’t connect that.”
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That’s because Briles’ shadow on the field remains, and controversy is easily ignited. All of the assistant coaches are still on the staff, another move that generated criticism. In the opener, Baylor offensive coordinator Kendal Briles penned his dad’s initials — “CAB,” with the C standing for "Coach" — on his hands. It proved an easy line of questioning for Grobe in the postgame press conference. He played that move off.
"I have no problems with that whatsoever," Grobe said from the podium. "If you don’t love your dad, then something’s wrong. I don’t have any problems with that at all. He’s got a little pressure on him because Art’s not a bad football coach. So his son, it’s can he gets this thing going like they had it going and tonight’s not a bad start."
That’s the risk-reward of this year with Grobe on the field. At best, Grobe could pair his defensive and special teams background with an offense that can hang 50 on anybody. Or this offseason could unravel the team at the first sign of real adversity in Big 12 play.
"Everybody here is ready for ball and coaches are here to coach us," running back Shock Linwood said. "So I would say that nothing is going to change, just the head coach is not here. I mean, he wants to be here as bad as anybody else wants to be here, so we can't do nothing."
Russell was one of the seniors who led the team out of the tunnel, something Starr used to do. He missed the back half of last season with a neck injury and is one of the team leaders. Yet, for at least one night, it felt good.
What Grobe can do with Briles and those assistants will determine how the Bears keep that locker room for the rest of the season.
"It felt like Baylor, we have all the same coaches minus one, but we have a great one replacing him," Russell said. "I’m real excited about it."
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Holly waits with Nicole and Ben in the coaches lounge before Jim emerges for a few pictures a little before 11 p.m. This might be home for only a year, but this is home for now. Baylor opened with a win, and for the players that felt good.
"I'm sure these kids and their parents — and I know I was — were ready to get back to playing football again," Grobe said.
Grobe has a clearer picture of what to expect, and he can sum it up like this. He didn’t say it this way at Big 12 Media Day. This is the balance Baylor is looking for. They’ll be in the cross-hairs for a while, but there’s a way to fix that.
"We talk a lot about character and behavior and doing things right off the field and that’s the most-important thing, no question," Grobe said. "That doesn’t take away from the fact that winning is very important, too. There is no doubt our coaching staff and players want to win. This is a team that in the last three years won two Big 12 championships. It’s not a stretch to think they should compete again for a Big 12 championship."
That's part of the equation, and those outside the stadium know the rest. A few hours before that catharsis, Fankhauser spanned the view outside McLane Stadium. He looked at the indoor facility, the football offices and the tailgate. He points at Sakakeeny and Dunlap. "I know the Baylor I believe in," he said, "and you believe in and you believe in."
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Fankhauser has to stop. Then from his chair, Dunlap says the rest.
"The focus has been on Briles or a player, but there's a bigger picture," Dunlap said. "I love my university and they're working on fixing things — they're spending literally millions on fixing. We want to win at football. We're going to win at football, but what happened was a sacrifice to winning football. It's something we needed to fix, and we're going to fix. That's the Baylor I believe in."
That's how they defend Baylor. That's how they own it now.
