Bowlsby remains vague on Baylor ‘verification’
FRISCO — During his opening address Monday at Big 12 media days, conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby declined to dive into the specifics of the troubling and still-ongoing situation at Baylor.
“As you know, we are doing a verification process that is not an investigation,” Bowlsby said. “It’s a verification of 105 recommendations that Pepper Hamilton put forward. We are still in the process of doings that and I expect we will bring it to a close in the not too distant future.”
The NCAA’s own separate investigation into years of sexual assault convictions and allegations made against Baylor athletes is reportedly nearing an end, though the Baptist university is expected to escape the sort of sanctions leveled against Penn State in 2012 stemming from a decades-long child sex abuse scandal.
Bowlsby announced last February that the Big 12 would withhold 25 percent of conference revenues distribution from Baylor until completion of a third-party review into how the university has implemented changes to prevent sexual misconduct and more adequately address allegations of sexual assault and abuse.
Last week, Baylor settled a Title IX lawsuit filed by a former volleyball player in which she declared the school grossly mishandled allegations she brought against a group of up to eight football players. The former student claimed she was drugged and gang-raped in 2012. It was the school’s fifth Title IX settlement.
“(Baylor athletic director)
Mack Rhoades has done an outstanding job working with us on it and has done an outstanding job working with the verification committee,” Bowlsby said. “And Matt
Rhule, as good of a football coach as he is, he’s an even better human being.
“We will continue our process, we will issue a report and we’ve said publically that we will issue a written report. When we can make more comments on it we will do so.”
Sports gambling causes uncertainty
It’s never been particularly difficult to bet on sports, and over the last two decades, the rise of technology has made gambling on everything from MLB’s Home Run Derby to the College Football Playoff exceedingly easy.
Last month it got even easier. On May 14, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing states to legalize sports betting. The ruling could provide a boost to states that adopt sports betting via increased tourism and tax revenue, and one Big 12 state (West Virginia) is preparing to have sports betting go live at its casinos in time for the start of football season.
Despite the recent ruling,
Bob Bowlsby said the conference has not yet engaged in a serious discussion about how to handle the new landscape.
“I think we’re very much in a wait-and-see environment right now,” Bowlsby said. “There’s a lot of talk about integrity fees. There is a lot of talk about how it gets managed. Are we really going to end up with 50 states that all have different laws on legalized gambling?
“What do we end up with if a couple of our states in the Big 12 footprint have legalized gambling and three others don’t? What do you end up with if some say you can bet on professional sports but you can’t bet on high school and college sports? It’s just taking a while to settle in and frankly I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”
Bowlsby did note the Big 12 has “not chosen” to issue publically available injury reports each week “because we want to get some answers relative to the student records and the like.”
He added: “My sense is that there’s going to be a human cry for that to happen and as long as we don’t get too far into the specifics of what the injury is and what kind of medication they may be taking and what the duration is and those kinds of things, but some sort of simple system may work.”