A Baylor Wide Problem
At the end of the day, Baylor lacked institutional control of not just their athletic department but their entire campus. Predictably, the NCAA failed to punish accordingly.
The NCAA Committee of Infractions (COI) finally concluded their investigation into Baylor athletic department’s cover-up of sexual assault by players on their football team and a litigant of other allegations from 2010-15. However, they were unable to find enough evidence or an explicit NCAA rule that justified a significantly harsher penalty.
Reluctantly, the committee of seven independent volunteers from different institutions was forced to rule that neither Baylor, nor former head coach Art Briles had committed NCAA infractions.
“Ultimately, and with tremendous reluctance, this panel agrees.”
The closing of this case sends a very specific message to four distinct groups that were all directly or indirectly affected by this ruling.
The Victims
The victims of these unspeakable acts will suffer in perpetuity. Even the harshest penalties of one’s wildest imagination—death penalty, bowl ban, millions in fines, scholarship loss, etc—could not heal the physical and emotional damage done.
The moral and ethical failings of the highest magnitude ran rampant across a campus saturated in a culture of indifference, ignorance and intolerance. Even former president Ken Starr described Baylor’s handling of campus sexual violence as a “colossal operational failure.”
How do you fix the problem where victims of sexual assault are continuously ignored by police, coaches and university officials?
The NCAA’s 51-page report only confirmed that they can not do anything to provide assistance either through a) preventative measures via NCAA legislation or b) enforce harsher punishments after the fact. As if that would be enough for closure or atonement to the victims.
Baylor University
For as much as the general public—and to some extent, an agenda driven media—wants to crucify the Baylor football program, two pieces of a much larger picture are being missed.
First is that the victims of sex crimes begin their case with one arm tied behind their back. Often they fail to report immediately due to a plethora of reasons that include the social taboo surrounding sex, alcohol and the influence of high powered individuals such as cops, coaches and counselors.
The second piece is that while the Baylor football program came under fire, the university itself seemed to avoid a vast amount of scrutiny that they should have received. It was a colossal failure on every level, and sexual assault cases across campus—by regular students and student athletes— were not reported, not followed up on or not taken seriously by administrators on every level.
I have long argued that Baylor University was the root of the problem and needed to be held to the highest standard of everyone. Even in 2014, “Baylor had no Title IX office, no Title IX coordinator, no Title IX education and no policies or procedures on reporting sexual and interpersonal violence.”
Before a Title IX coordinator was hired, it was estimated that 25 total reports were filed in five years (~5/year). Within the next two years, 416 reports were filed (~208/year).
And while Baylor has implemented all 105 of Pepper Hamilton require reforms, the school has also been able to raise one billion dollars on new athletic and academic projects as they operated as close to ‘business as usual’ as you can be.
There should have been swift, decisive and immediate punishments and reprimands given to Baylor. Instead this is what transpired:
Big 12
Two Million Dollar fine for reputational damage to the conference
Reimburse the Big 12 $1,651,000 in legal fees
Withheld conference distributions of $14,255,000
The difference of $12,604,000 will be invested over 48 months and the net earnings will be distributed equally to the 10 institutions annually. That revenue wil be earmarked for funding campus-wide and athletics prevention efforts focused on sexual and gender-based harassment and violence, intimate partner violence, and stalking, included but not limited to programming addressing healthy relationships, LGBTQ+ discrimination and bystander awareness.
Conservatively, if you can get an eight percent return on this investment then each year should net $1,008,320 in profit. Dividing that by 10 would allow each school roughly $100,832 in annual budget ($403,328 for four years).
NCAA
Four years probation through August 10, 2025
A five-year show case penalty for the former Assistant Director of Football Operations through August of 2026.
A $5,000 fine
Public Reprimand
Various recruiting restrictions on visits and communication time windows
Vacation of team/individual records for when ineligible student athletes competed
This only affects the 2011 season and any individual awards won by eligible student athletes will remain. So it is likely that RGIII’s Heisman will remain, however, wins against Oklahoma, Texas and Washington in the Alamo Bowl could be vacated.
To me, Baylor acted disgracefully throughout the process as they never attempted to resolve a campus-wide problem in covering up sexual assault; a dysfunctional relationship at best with campus and Waco police; no Title IX office; no accountability within the athletic department with regards to training or reporting; and lacked transparency during the investigation and board meetings.
A source confirmed with me that this analysis was ‘one million percent right.’
Another source told me that at least one Baylor donor told a Baylor official, ‘I’m paying for a championship’ in the immediate aftermath of when the scandal broke.
The NCAA
The NCAA continued to prove themselves as a joke of an organization in what has been an even more reputation damning year than normal: mishandling the Covid-19 pandemic; attempting to justify ‘separate but equal’ logic for how the women’s NCAA basketball tournament was held; being put on blast by the United State Supreme Court and then scrambling to create new NIL legislation; and finally announcing that they could offer nothing more than a slap on the wrist to Baylor.
Essentially, the infractions committee found Baylor ‘not guilty’ of any NCAA violations stemming from the athletic department covering up sexual assault cases. The NCAA leaves it up to each member institution on how they deal with these cases and therefore there is no universal guiding legislation that the NCAA can act on.
Consequently, the NCAA was investigating to see if Baylor student athletes received improper benefits by having their sexual assault allegations covered up, dismissed, or reversed. Further, the investigation also centered on determining if Baylor lacked institutional control or if former coach Briles failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance.
An improper benefit is defined as when a student athlete receives something—cash, food, class extra credit, a waived fee of some kind, etc—that a regular student does not have access to. For example, Baylor student athletes could receive free pizza during a school sanctioned pizza party since it is available to any student. But that same student athlete could not get free pizza from a restaurant when a regular student must pay. That would be an impermissible benefit. (This is now moot due to new NIL legislation, which just took affect July 1, 2021).
The committee found that BU student athletes who had their sexual assault cases covered up, ignored or given a lesser punishment was not an extra benefit because Baylor was doing the same for any student. That means (in theory) a regular business major or pre-med student was receiving the same kind of protection as an athlete when it came to the school looking the other way on their sexual violence case.
Since it was determined that there was no additional benefit, it had to be concluded that there was not a lack of institutional control or that Briles failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance. This is ironic because clearly Baylor lacked control across campus, which should include their athletic department.
Instead the NCAA tagged Baylor guilty of the following:
Failing to report a player for cheating on a quiz.
Other minor benefits were also listed in the report including a student manager paying a $310.25 of a player’s parking fines and an assistant coach writing a community service reflection paper on a player’s behalf.
Failing to properly suspend players for failing drug tests.
Baylor Bruins—mainly a female host recruiting organization—was not properly aligned to NCAA bylaws and did not have a formal relationship with the university admissions office or campus visits.
The former assistant director of football operations refused to interview with the COI.
Although the committee found these few violations, they were the equivalent of arresting Al Capone for tax evasion.
Art Briles
Former head coach Briles cooperated fully with the NCAA’s investigation and, from his perspective, was rewarded when he was exonerated from any NCAA wrongdoing.
However, the committee made sure to go out of their way to say multiple times that they believed Coach Briles—as well as Baylor—morally and ethically failed at every level. They just could not punish them due to how the NCAA by laws are constructed.
“Independent of potential NCAA violations, this panel expects more of campus leaders. As individuals responsible for the well-being and development of young people, they should have done more to report these allegations regardless of a lack of training or reporting policies. Simply put, they should have known better.”
A statement by Briles’ lawyer asserts otherwise:
“My client Art Briles has been completely exonerated and cleared of all NCAA violations alleged against him. As the NCAA Committee on Infractions explained, the conduct at issue was pervasive and widespread throughout the Baylor campus, and it was ignored or condoned by the highest levels of Baylor's leadership. The NCAA's decision today clears the way for Mr. Briles to return to coaching college football."
Completely exonerated feels like a stretch, and the COI certainly tried to make it as difficult as possible for Briles to ever return to coaching collegiate football with this statement:
“The head coach failed to meet even the most basic expectations of how a person should react to the kind of conduct at issue in this case. Furthermore, as a campus leader, the head coach is held to an even higher standard. He completely failed to meet this standard.”
The question remains will Art Briles get a second chance?
I have long argued that—right or wrong—the pathway is there for Briles to return to coaching in college football as the passage of time and the desire for winning seems to be a cure all. If that is what Briles truly wants, this NCAA ruling was another victory for him. Briles also received a letter in 2017 from Baylor General Counsel Chris Holmes admitting that Briles did not cover up any sexual assault cases.
It is undoubtedly an uphill battle for Briles, who has an image that needs more rehabbing if he were to truly make a return. Being a head coach may be a stretch, and it may be easier, and more appropriate, to be an assistant. He also has connections as many associated with the Baylor program either quickly returned to college athletics or simply never left—including Ian McCaw, now the AD at Liberty, and Kendall Briles, now the OC at Arkansas.
The NCAA took over five years to publish their report and dish out punishment to Baylor. It has once again put a limelight on their own ineptitude as an organization. There is nothing in their bylaws that would allow them to punish Baylor, Briles or anybody else either significantly or swiftly.
And at the end of the day, the NCAA allows their member institutions to continuously fail victims of sexual assault violence by doing exactly what Baylor did: passing the responsibility to somebody else.
Penn State; Michigan State; Baylor and LSU are just four universities that have allowed years if not decades of abuse to be ignored. Forever operating under the premise of being too important to deal with it and too big to fail.
Perhaps the NCAA will make widespread change, but until then they continue to fail the victims. Ordinarily, the NCAA stands for Never Cared About Athletes; unless that athlete is in jeopardy of missing games—and by extension an opportunity to make their school or the NCAA money.
Then it stands for Not Caring About Abuse.