With regards to Art Briles, the Tiger-Cats still don’t get it.
Among my email correspondence today is this: “(Art) Briles had nothing to do with what went on at Baylor. Not one single thing.” It concluded that the CFL and people like me “will one day look like idiots.”
This is not a particularly surprising reaction from a reader to a story such as the Hamilton Tiger- Cats’ brief employment of the former Baylor University football coach, fraught as it is with allegations that have not been tested in court.
What is surprising is that the Ticats still seem to feel that way themselves.
Head coach June Jones spoke to a group of reporters at Tim Hortons Field on Tuesday, when he was originally supposed to be introducing Briles as his new assistant coach, before that idea was squelched by a 12- hour blast of controversy. Jones, a former NFL and U. S. college coach who was given the Hamilton job late last week, said he and Briles have been friends for 40 years. Jones said he was about “helping people.” And he said that this — the hiring and forced unhiring — “was really an emotional thing for me.”
And then he said he didn’t want to talk anymore about it. Football questions only, please.
Jones had decided t o name a new starting quarterback. No one cared. It takes some doing to get a bunch of media unconcerned with a quarterback controversy.
Asked if he thought Briles — who was fired by Baylor last year when an independent review by a law firm found his football program had, among other things, failed “to identify and respond to a pattern of sexual violence by a football player” and “failed to take appropriate action” in response to reports of a gang rape carried out by players on his team — had been treated unfairly, Jones stopped short of saying yes, but only just.
“I have my own opinion on the whole thing, but it’s meaningless right now,” the coach said. But he was happy to talk football. There was, notably, not one attempt to apologize for the initial decision to hire Briles.
This came a few hours after Tiger- Cats chief executive Scott Mitchell did some media rounds on Tuesday, and was contrite, but only to a point. Speaking to Toronto’s Fan 590 radio station, he said the Ticats “underestimated the tsunami of negativity that was going to happen” as a result of the hiring. Later, speaking to reporters at Tim Hortons Field, Mitchell said they reversed course on Briles when it became clear that “what was being contemplated was totally unacceptable to the general public.” And also to “the media.”
After saying again that the public found it unacceptable, Mitchell allowed that “it was a poor decision that shouldn’t have been made.”
Again, no apology. Only Tiger- Cats owner Bob Young offered one of those, saying in a prepared statement, “We want to apologize to our fans, corporate partners and the Canadian Football League.”
So, in sum, the Tiger- Cats are sorry for making a decision to hire someone who left his last job in the middle of a huge sexual assault scandal because they didn’t realize the public would be quite so outraged about it.
This remains an utterly baffling explanation f or what happened. Aside from being “f ootball myopic,” which Mitchell also copped to, the decision to bring in Briles, for half a season to help coach an 0- 8 club, only starts to make a bit of sense, if you squint at it a certain way, if Hamilton management thought that he had been unfairly railroaded out at Baylor. There’s certainly evidence that this is what they were thinking. After acknowledging that the “circumstances of what happened down there are horrific,” Mitchell said, “I think it will play itself out as to what responsibility, specifically, Art Briles had.”
In his earlier radio comments, Mitchell said “there’s the truth about what happened, and there’s what is out there in the media.” Coupled with Jones’ “own opinion on the whole thing,” the conclusion looks like the team thought that Briles was some sort of scapegoat, and so they, and his old friend, threw him a lifeline.
And this is where it is fair to wonder if Ticats management has learned anything here, other than that news does, in fact, travel across international borders. Art Briles isn’t in football exile because he made a couple of dumb mistakes. He was, at the very least, at the head of a football program that did not take certain accusations of sexual violence seriously, and allegedly much worse than that. Head football coaches at big U. S. schools are all powerful, usually paid more t han s c hool presidents and often much more than any other public servant in their state. And while this scandal was unfolding in his program, over many years, Briles was, in his estimation, an unwitting rube.
It’s not that Briles doesn’t deserve a second chance because the public will be angry, it’s that the public was right to be angry. The TigerCats had no business offering someone image rehabilitation j ust because they made his pal head coach a few days ago.
It is odd that the Hamilton front office remains unclear on that. This will play itself out, but quite possibly not in the way Scott Mitchell imagines.
NOT ONE ATTEMPT TO APOLOGIZE FOR (HIRING) BRILES.