It's time to stop waiting for Baylor to do the "right" thing. Or any semblance of the "right" thing, even.
At every critical juncture of the university's proceedings in handling sexual violence allegations involving football players, Baylor has failed.
MORE: Baylor officials accused of covering up more assaults
It failed the victims, whose voices in many cases were never heard. It failed the student body by propagating the notion of a justice system and offering instead a very real system of corruption. It failed the city of Waco when the university became bedfellows with the Waco police, making both parties complicit in the sort of systemic cover-up that would make the Nixon administration blush.
But the worst part of this entire disastrous bungling is that no one quite knows how much we don't know about the rest of the sexual violence accusations with regard to Baylor's football program because the university and the Waco police are conspiring to keep it that way.
On Tuesday, a new "Outside the Lines" report citing Waco police documents revealed at least two more allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence against members of the football team, neither of which were among the multitude of other reports of sexual violence at Baylor in the past six years.
One of the newly discovered cases stems from a 2011 incident in which three Baylor players were charged with assault at an off-campus event.
According to the documents, Baylor and Waco police decided to work together to keep the case out of the public eye, including the case's investigating officer discussing with a Waco police commander that "the case be pulled from the computer system so that only persons who had a reason to inquire about the report would be able to access it." The details and files relevant to that case, according to ESPN, were then placed in a locked office.
The documents also revealed that a sexual assault allegation against another Baylor player — referred to only as "a star" in ESPN's report — remained "open" in the Waco Police Department's case system, effectively taking that case off the public radar for as long as its status remained unclosed.
"The player and the alleged victim deny any assault took place, and in a separate criminal investigation, Waco police noted that officers had dealt with the woman as part of other allegations she had made against various people and concluded she was 'deceptive,'" ESPN explained in the report.
A victim in one of the cases told ESPN she notified Wes Yeary, the team's football chaplain, Art Briles, the head coach and Baylor president Ken Starr about an April 2014 incident with her boyfriend, Devin Chafin, a six-foot, 220-pound running back. She alleged Chafin physically assaulted her on two separate occasions, both times grabbing her and slamming her into something.
The victim reported both incidents to Waco police, providing photos of the bruising she suffered in the wake of the incident. Baylor nor Briles ever disciplined Chafin.
"I'd seen other girls go through it, and nothing ever happened to the football players," she told "Outside the Lines." "It's mind-boggling to see it continue to happen. I can't understand why. I think as long as they're catching footballs and scoring touchdowns, the school won't do anything."
MORE: Baylor's lazy approach in sex assault cases has Title IX implications
And therein lies the problem: Baylor, by all accounts, doesn't seem to care about the public perception of its school outside of its successful football identity. It has shown its systemic neglect — from failing to be Title IX compliant for years past the deadline to intentionally obscuring police records from the public — on such a regular schedule that one can almost set a watch to the release of new, damning information.
Baylor cares so little about the non-football perception of its university that during a public relations crisis, it issues a statement such as this to "OTL": "We are certain the actions that result from this deliberative process will yield improvements across a variety of areas that rebuild and reinforce confidence in our university. We are saddened when any student, including a student-athlete, acts in a manner inconsistent with Baylor's mission or is a victim of such behavior."
Perhaps president Starr and the rest of the university brass should pause for a moment and ask themselves a simple question: "What is Baylor's mission?"
Is it being hellbent on winning football games at any cost? Is it incubating a culture of criminality? Whatever Baylor's mission, it has for too long been muddied by a tainted football program. Someone needs to be held accountable for this mess.
"If we made mistakes, let’s live up to them, let’s own them and then correct the situation," Starr told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in April.
Mistakes should be unintentional and infrequent, like forgetting to take out the garbage on trash day. Withholding information and colluding with police for years is not a mistake, no matter how one tries to spin it.
How many times can you repeat a "mistake" until it becomes intentional, Mr. Starr?