Say what you will about the sometimes revolving door of players transferring or being dismissed with head coach Kliff Kingsbury, but I can all but assure you that what allegedly happened in Waco with Art Briles and his assistant coaches won’t happen at Texas Tech.
The Chron’s Jenny Dial Creech has the text messages from Art Briles when his players were in trouble and how Briles. This evidence was produced recently as a result of lawsuit filed by a former member of the football staff.
When one of his underage players was cited for illegal consumption of alcohol, Briles texted an assistant coach: “Hopefully he’s under radar enough they won’t recognize name… Just trying to keep him away from our judicial affairs folks…”
Another time, Colin Shillinglaw (the former assistant athletic director who filed the most recent defamation action against the regents) texted Briles that one of his players who got a massage in a spa exposed himself to the masseuse and asked for “favors.” Briles responded and asked if the woman was a stripper and, when told she was not, responded “Not as bad.”
There are other examples of players who were doing drugs, selling drugs, pulling a gun on another student, assaulting another student. Briles’ responses via text and e-mail all show he was allowing his players to act above the law. He never pursued proper disciplinary actions against any of them.
Former Baylor player Tevin Elliott, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, allegedly sexually assaulted five women between 2009-2012. Briles was notified after the last incident but waited 10 days before taking any action and suspending Elliott from the football team.
Briles also had knowledge about sexual assaults involving players Shawn Oakman and Sam Ukwuachu, both of whom had been criminally charged.
And Briles and McCaw allegedly discussed a gang rape that involved five football players. Rather than go through proper channels to report the incident, McCaw kept it in house and went to Briles and his staff.
“When he did, Coach Briles studied the names on the piece of paper. ‘Those are some bad dudes,’ Coach Briles told (an assistant) coach,” the document states. “ ’Why was she around those guys?’ ”
There were supposedly a handful of administrative types and big-wigs that wanted to hire Briles and I hope that each and every one of those people want to vomit in their cereal bowl as they read this. And you should also be ashamed of yourselves or really, really pissed off that your friend, Art Briles, lied to you. One way or the other, you should apologize because the writing was on the wall with this and if you really thought that Briles was completely innocent then you have a perception problem.
And Baylor kept all of those assistant coaches and they knew all of this. They can go to hell too.
And as the comments will eventually fill up with “burn the program down” CBS Sports Jon Solomon writes that Baylor may never suffer the way that you would expect, mainly because the NCAA doesn’t have the subpoena power to force documents and information to come forward. Sitting back and waiting for the details above to come out organically suits the NCAA to then better levy punishment, if any.
And there’s also the thought that conferences may be better suited to deal with this situation than the NCAA:
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, while not speaking specifically about Baylor, suggested conferences are better suited than the NCAA to respond to these issues because conferences can react quicker and understand the real-time recruiting dynamics regarding players with questionable behavior.
“There’s been plenty of criticism in the national enforcement infractions process,” said Sankey, the chair of the Division I Committee on Infractions. “That may be a cautionary tale for the NCAA as it approaches these issues. We also recognize we’ve got Department of Education requirements that already exist. We have laws. It’s not as if the NCAA is filling a vacuum.”
Solomon also points out that one of the ways that the NCAA can punish Baylor is if players received extra benefits, which would include preferential treatment than non-athletes. Now, finally now, we have proof about how the coach and AD actually did exactly that.