By Dan Wetzel Yahoo Sports
Kenneth Starr and I were standing in the middle of a Baylor tailgate one fine Waco night in October of 2013. The Bears' football program that was once a laughingstock had become a national power – in a couple hours it would gain 872 yards and hang 73 points on West Virginia.
This was before the game, though, with huge throngs of fans gathered around and the school president happy to chat. Starr was clad in a green and yellow tracksuit and could be described as fervently peppy. It was slightly unnerving. I previously knew him only as the author of a, um, heated report in relation to an eventual impeachment of a president, which is to say that weird situations tend to happen when you cover college football.
One of the topics broached during our conversation was that the University of Texas was soon to have a coaching vacancy and what he thought might happen if it plopped a Bevo-sized pile of cash in front of coach Art Briles, the architect of the Baylor renaissance.
Starr responded that Baylor also had plenty to offer, but just in case he put his hand on my shoulder, revival style, and bowed his head in prayer.
“Dear Lord,” Kenneth Starr said, “please keep Coach Briles at Baylor. Amen.”
Then he laughed. It was funny. Sort of.
Coach Briles isn’t staying at Baylor and Ken Starr isn’t going to be its president and Ian McCaw is essentially out as athletic director, the school announced Thursday. With the release of a “finding of facts” – which is actually devoid of any specific facts – the school-funded independent investigation uncovered abject failures in how the athletic department dealt with sexual assaults on campus, most notably within the football program.
“Baylor failed to take appropriate action to respond to reports of sexual assault and dating violence reportedly committed by football players,” the report reads. “The choices made by football staff and athletics leadership, in some instances, posed a risk to campus safety and the integrity of the University.”
It goes on from there.
Depraved stuff. Despicable stuff.
In a nutshell, the report suggests that football became too important. Common decency, basic morality and clear-cut policy were ignored in pursuit of Big 12 championships. This from a school that McCaw once bragged to Sports Illustrated saw athletics as a higher calling.
“Our goal is to glorify God through our athletic department,” he told the magazine.
Baylor’s God may not be all that appreciative. Let this be an awakening, spiritual or otherwise, for every school to downgrade the importance of college athletics, even in the face of shrieking fans that demand greater and greater athletic glory and will excuse almost anything that helps achieve it.
And in that vein, let this be a time to pause for all those howling for the NCAA to come in and sanction the Baylor football team. When dealing with unreported or essentially covered-up sexual assaults, NCAA bylaws just don't seem too important. Or they shouldn't.
If everyone agrees that football became too central of a focus, then isn’t handling this scandal via football penalties just an exacerbation of the problem?
This is a criminal matter, a civil matter, a Department of Education matter and, most importantly, a matter that victims of the players will struggle to deal with for the rest of their lives. It’s serious. It’s sickening. It’s societal.
To boil it down to a decrease in grants of aid or recruiting visits is to trivialize it even further. For a moment, just forget about football.
The NCAA tried this with Penn State and since then my thinking has changed. The actions of Jerry Sandusky were horrific, but removed from the emotions of the day, penalizing a football team for such criminal depravity was the NCAA trying to seize a moral high ground.
It’s unlikely it caused much healing among Sandusky’s victims. Instead, it missed the point. If Penn State allowed football to get too big, then why honor that by making Penn State football the target. If anything it galvanized some fans who sadly used the sanctions to play the victim card, like going 10-2 rather than 7-5 is some kind of inalienable right.
The NCAA struggles to handle simple tasks. It is out of its element wading into a case with this level of severity and sensitivity. You can argue Baylor gained a competitive edge from not properly dealing with these assaults but let their punishment be that horrible realization.
That’s your program. That’s your school. Those 1-11 seasons never looked so good.
The motives for those shouting for football penalties are questionable anyway. Are they really outraged by violence against women in Waco, or are they just looking for a rival program to get their comeuppance and lose some future recruiting juice?
In other words, is this about football?
How about we keep the focus on the victims, on the system, on the culpability of more than just the dismissed parties? How about we concentrate on prevention and education? How about we work to prevent sexual assaults? How about we press Baylor to release its full findings and not hide behind purposely misinterpreted privacy laws? How about we stop caring about Baylor football and start caring about how intercollegiate athletics has gotten so lost that otherwise intelligent, highly successful and driven men could act this way?
How about in a scandal where football got too big, we, for once, not make football too big?
Amen.
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