Art Briles did his job, and firing him for doing so at this juncture is the most hypocritical, disingenuous play by Baylor to date. Which is saying a lot.
The school's leaders already had established themselves as the worldwide Baptist leaders in disingenuous hypocrisy long before Thursday’s somewhat stunning announcement that they had fired their football coach.
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This is not to say firing Briles was wrong.
Just late. And for all the wrong reasons.
This was not a school doing the right thing. This was a school doing the politically expedient one, deciding the bad pub and fallout was no longer worth the wins and cash influx.
They stood by Briles down in Waco long after it became clear they had a rape problem on his football team. They defended him and enabled him long, long after the Texas Monthly story appeared and case after case after case emerged of young women at Baylor being sexually assaulted by players Briles had recruited. They tried to keep him even as cover-up details started to emerge .
Baylor president Ken Starr — yes, that Kenneth Starr — must be privately wishing he had turned up even 1/10th of the kind of stuff going down at his school during his Clinton investigation.
He wasted tax dollars on what amounted to infidelity. What happened in Waco was turning a blind eye to a football program run amok, with young college girls paying the steep price for that loss of soul.
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Yet Starr is allowed to keep a job (though he was demoted). The athletic director can stay, too, and why exactly is he only on double-secret probation ? His department failed, so he failed. And what exactly does probation entail anyway? Another couple of rapes, and Ian McCaw is gone?
This starts with the Baylor alumni and fans who defended Briles and attacked anybody who dared to question him or what was going down in Waco. Their support, ultimately, is how he survived for so long.
These were guys with daughters and wives, or daughters and wives themselves who had a voice and decided to use it to defend Briles rather than these women. The reason is because Briles had accomplished the only things we care about in college sports: He won, and his program made money.
There is a brand-spanking-new stadium in Waco that probably one day might have borne Briles name if not for the pesky little detail of all of those young women whose lives were forever changed. It is so easy, in hindsight, to say no player, no matter how talented, is worth risking your reputation and legacy for yet signing days shows are dedicated to the celebration of just such guys and 10-2 seasons oftentimes come on their backs. And all of this legacy talk is moot without more W's than L's. Losing coaches do not have reps or legacies. They get fired.
So what Briles really did was a cost-benefit analysis, and all of his shareholders, from the President to money-donating alums in Waco and beyond agreed.
The hypocrisy is not that they made this trade.
The hypocrisy is pretending now to care.
And y’all in Tallahassee, Fla., and State College, Pa., and almost everywhere in between are lying to yourselves if you do not think similar cost-benefit analyses happen on their campuses. How tempting it is to just look away.
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There are few teams especially in the beginning of a rebuild as big as what Briles faced at Baylor, who do not take fliers on players with dangerous potential. There are coaches in every corner of college football praying that the worst does not happen and the gamble does not backfire.
The problem is, in a case like Baylor, they are gambling with the bodies and lives of young girls who did not sign up for this.
If the NCAA has any balls, and I highly doubt they do, they will send an email this morning to every school. No more half measures. In this age of rape culture on college campuses, the next school that has an athletic department with a “tone and culture within (the) football program as it relates to accountability for all forms of athlete misconduct,” like Baylor's, will be subject to the death penalty.
No more chasing ham sandwiches or booster payments.
The role of this organization should be to rein in an entire college sports system run amok, or they should go away all together.
The thing is redemption was there for Briles all along. All he had to do was come clean, to ask forgiveness, to change how he did business. He needed only to say, “This is on me, I brought this guy in and for that I am responsible.” He needed to promise and deliver on a culture change. He needed to say sorry.
Instead, he said he was done talking about it.
And the Baylor family rallied around him right until doing so became a publicity nightmare. This was not Baylor finding moral courage. This was them lacking courage to stand by what they had created, enabled and defended.
They did not do the right thing, just the politically expedient, hypocritical one.