Baylor Probably Deserves the Death Penalty

Just when I thought I couldn’t be shocked anymore by scandal in college athletics, Baylor came and proved I was wrong. I believed that Penn State had been the nadir, that I would never see a scandal that heinous in my lifetime, at least not related to college football. But here we are.

I don’t want to sit here and say one of these is worse than the other; these are both heinous crimes and human tragedies that extend well beyond the football field, and both are shocking and horrifying in their own right.

I think what makes the situation at Baylor resonate a bit more is because I am not that far removed from a college campus myself, and what happened at Baylor seems more likely to occur on other campuses. A football coach becoming a minor god and protecting his pedophile defensive coordinator is probably a one time thing, but rape and sexual assault occurs with alarming regularity on college campuses.

Just this week an NCAA Student Athlete was convicted on three counts of felony sexual assault for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. He will serve six months in prison for this. What kind of message does that send?

This is a problem, and it wasn’t just a problem at Baylor. What sets Baylor apart are the by now well known facts: Baylor didn’t have a Title IX officer to advise staff and otherwise handle sexual assault allegations, Head Coach Art Briles and his staff conducted interviews with the alleged victims to determine the validity of their allegations which in turn prevented the University from fulfilling Clery Act and Title IX obligations, players with pending charges were allowed to take the field and play, Briles took chances on players who had been kicked off other teams for what can politely be called “character issues” to the detriment of the students on campus. In a phrase, Briles and his staff made campus, at some level, unsafe for other students.

Baylor commissioned an investigation by the law firm Pepper Hamilton, and you can read the University’s summary of that investigation here. The heavy stuff about the football program starts on about page 10, but it’s clear throughout that while the University as a whole has serious structural and institutional problems around this, the football program occupies a special place.

The win at all costs culture that many deride college football for having manifested in the worst possible way in Baylor, and now people’s lives are irrevocably shattered, irreversibly changed.

Which is why Baylor probably deserves the death penalty.

They won’t get it though. For starters, the NCAA typically only hands down the Death Penalty to repeat offenders who repeat offend in a five year period. It’s not clear that anything done at Baylor violated the NCAA’s rules such that the committee on infractions would get involved. Remember, the only program in NCAA Football history to get the death penalty was SMU, because some boosters were paying folks and Erik Dickerson got a car. Ohio State got dinged a few years ago for having players that traded memorabilia for tattoos, among other things. Miami has gotten dinged a few times for impermissible benefits.

All of that seems so trite compared to what’s gone on in Waco, but it also shows where the NCAA really believes it has authority to act. These so-called impermissible benefits could give a competitive edge to one school over in recruiting, and could unfairly tip the balance of power in certain directions, and undermine the integrity of college athletics.

You could make the argument that Baylor players received an impermissible benefit by being allowed access to a different disciplinary process than would be available to other students. I would argue that having the most powerful man in Baylor history running investigations into your alleged wrongdoing with a mind to keeping you from getting caught is a rather huge benefit.

But in all likelihood, both because this doesn’t really fall into the NCAA’s purview and because they’re still smarting from the disaster their Penn State sanctions turned out to be, the NCAA will sit this one out. Even though, in my mind, nothing could undermine the integrity of college athletics more than a coach protecting rapists and abusers so he could win football games, the NCAA will sit this one out.

Which is why Baylor ought to self-impose a one year death penalty.

They won’t of course, not now that they’ve built a brand new stadium, and named Jim Grobe head coach. Grobe has retained all of Briles’ staff, some of whom may have been complicit in the violations that got Briles’ and Baylor AD Ian McCaw fired. The potential loss of money from this season, likely worth tens of millions of dollars, will be too much to pass up. Scheduling for the rest of the Big 12 will suddenly get really weird. It seems as though things are going to try to be “normal” in Waco this fall.

Still, they ought to sit this one out. Think about the message that would send to the rest of the country. Think about McClane stadium, just three years old, sitting empty on bright, beautiful Saturdays, the Brazos river rolling by while a west Texas wind howls through its empty bleachers. There would be no practices, no meetings, no games. The silence in that stadium would be a deafening reminder to the rest of the country that there are some things bigger than football, and that winning isn’t everything, and that you care about what happened on your campus. You really care. Let your recruits and current players walk if they want to, or stay and work on their degrees if they so choose. Do the right thing.

If Baylor really wants to prove to the public that winning isn’t everything, that football success doesn’t exist as an end in and of itself and that it’s just one piece of a larger university fabric, something dramatic needs to be done. Baylor deserves the death penalty, even if they don’t get it.

[PHOTO CRED: RYLAND BARTON / KWBU NEWS]