PROSPECT LEFT IN LIMBO
Unresolved case hampers NFL future
Jeremy Faulk runs on his own. He lifts weights. Last month at a Division II college in Kansas he compiled physical marks that rival those of the best defensive line prospects in this week’s NFL draft.
But that performance came in front of a fraction of the number of scouts who attended his former school’s pro day. Twentynine teams were represented when Baylor held its pro day April 5.
Faulk was briefly a defensive tackle at Baylor, never suiting up in a game for the Bears. His departure from the school after its sexual assault scandal leaves him facing questions about his future, particularly one in profes- sional football.
In the two years before Faulk’s January 2016 transfer to Baylor after playing at Garden City (Kan.) Community College and Florida Atlantic University, two Bears players had been convicted of sexual assault. At the time of Faulk’s enrollment, Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton was in the midst of an investigation of
the school’s handling of sexual assaults, with a close eye on the football program.
In May 2016, “findings of fact” by Pepper Hamilton revealed a Baylor football program with “no culture of accountability for misconduct.” Coach Art Briles was fired as a result of the report.
A week later, Faulk was gone, too
At the time, Faulk was the subject of a Title IX investigation that stemmed from a sexual assault complaint after he arrived here. But that was not the reason for his dismissal. Instead, the school let the unanswered allegation factor into its decision making while retroactively vetting and punishing Faulk for an incident at a previous school.
“They were supposed to give me a chance to defend myself,” Faulk said. “They just threw me out. They didn’t give me a chance to do nothing. It was just my name came up and I was done.”
At the time of his dismissal from the football team, Faulk had not been notified of the Title IX investigation into the allegation against him.
Instead, several Baylor administrators told Faulk it was Faulk’s misrepresentation of an incident at Florida Atlantic his lawyer calls a “dormitory prank” that led to his dismissal. Though Baylor said it found that incident sufficient to dismiss Faulk from the team, it wasn’t aware of it when he arrived on campus because the school had not performed a more thorough background check before admitting him.
“I think there’s some real questions, and I know I’m not alone here, about the way this was handled,” said Dwight Allman, an associate professor of political science at Baylor.
“The questions in this case concern whether there wasn’t an overreaction on the part of certain administrators that is, certainly in the broader context, understandable given what’s unfolded and how hard it has hit Baylor as an institution.”
After Faulk’s dismissal from the football team, Baylor asserted he withdrew from the school after missing one class day. On June 10, Lyn Wheeler Kinyon, Baylor’s assistant vice president for financial aid, notified Faulk via email that Baylor had canceled his scholarship.
Faulk appealed, and a panel of three staff members from Baylor’s financial aid office, chaired by Kinyon, rejected the athletics department’s argument that Faulk misled the department about prior conduct.
The panel reinstated Faulk’s scholarship on July 6. Faulk’s attorney, Richard Tate, asked a day later if Faulk could rejoin the football team should the player prevail in a Title IX hearing, but the Baylor athletics department said Faulk would not be on the team regardless of the outcome of the hearing.
Instead, he went back to Garden City, and Baylor suspended the Title IX investigation.
“It just seems like everything has affected everybody but Baylor,” said Jeff Sims, Faulk’s coach at Garden City. “They’re protecting Baylor. Not the girls. Not the men. Nobody was treated in a process that would bring justice to anybody involved.” NO VETTING Baylor hired Pepper Hamilton after the sexual assault conviction of former player Sam Ukwuachu in August 2015, and on May 26, 2016, the law firm released its report detailing the university’s mishandling of sexual violence accusations.
Ukwuachu had transferred from Boise State, which said he was in good standing when he came to Baylor. But Briles and then-Boise State coach Chris Petersen disagreed publicly about how much was known about Ukwuachu’s alleged domestic violence against his then-girlfriend before transferring.
The questions around Ukwuachu’s transfer did not prompt Baylor to further examine incoming transfer players, including Faulk before he arrived in January 2016. Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said that would not be unusual.
“I don’t know of any colleges that would go that far, unless something came up,” he said.
Regardless, Pepper Hamilton’s report drew attention to the foot- ball program’s failure to “consistently conduct due diligence with respect to potential transfers.” After Pepper Hamilton briefed the Baylor board of regents, Baylor asked Faulk to sign a release to get records from his previous schools.
He signed the release June 1 after he had returned to campus from a post-spring term break. A day later, FAU sent a student conduct report that Baylor would present as the foundation of Faulk’s dismissal.
An FAU police report from November 2013 describes Faulk and two other football players entering the room of a teammate, teasing him and his girlfriend and threatening to pull off the sheets as the couple was naked in bed. The three football players left, and a resident assistant called police after being contacted by the teammate.
In an incident report, the teammate who was in bed with his girlfriend described it as “sexual harassment.” FAU police deemed it a “suspicious incident.”
Faulk said the players were “joking around.”
“I don’t see how anybody could take the position that Jeremy’s record at Florida Atlantic demonstrates a basis to deny his admission into Baylor,” Tate said. “I don’t know if they did or didn’t do the due diligence because I don’t know that they did … but I do think because of that statement in the Pepper Hamilton report, the effort was to get rid of Jeremy.”
Ukwuachu’s 2015 conviction — which was overturned on appeal last month and is headed for a new trial — prompted the Big 12 Conference to propose a serious misconduct policy that was passed in February 2016.
Baylor did not develop “additional layers of review” until last spring, said Nick Joos, Baylor’s then-executive associate athletics director for external affairs, adding that the information about the Florida Atlantic incident led a transfer review committee to “render the player ineligible for the team.”
At Faulk’s appeal, associate athletics director for compliance Keith Miller made the case that Faulk misled the school in failing to disclose the FAU incident on his application.
Baylor argued that the incident and the academic probation Faulk was on at Florida Atlantic constituted misconduct he concealed. Miller asserted that Baylor would not have signed Faulk — who was the National Junior College Athletic Association defensive player of the year in 2015 — had it known about the incident.
“If I look back at this history, I’m going to let him into Baylor every day of the week,” Sokolow said. “He hasn’t done anything.”
Sims, who was an assistant coach at Florida Atlantic at the time, said the coaches made players run in practice as discipline for the incident.
“The investigation that they did in May, if they do that in January, I think he’s still coming to Baylor,” Sims said. “They got rid of him because they were trying to cover their butt.” TITLE IX INVESTIGATION Though Baylor made its case for dismissal based on the Florida Atlantic incident, Baylor’s Title IX investigation into Faulk loomed over the decision.
A Baylor student filed a complaint of an April 2016 sexual assault on May 5. Faulk said the encounter was consensual, but the woman told ESPN that Faulk “forced me to do things that I didn’t want to do against my own consent.”
Faulk said acting head football coach Jim Grobe told him June 3 the school was dismissing him and that the decision was out of the coach’s hands.
Sims said he spoke to Grobe a day later and Grobe mentioned the Title IX report. Sims says Grobe told him that if Faulk left, the Title IX investigation would go away.
Yet Chad Jackson, Baylor’s associate athletics director for compliance, said in an email June 7 there was not a Title IX report at Baylor. The school’s Title IX office informed Faulk hours later by email that there was.
Though Baylor told Faulk repeatedly he was not dismissed for Title IX reasons, the school now says that just the presence of the April sexual assault allegation factored in the decision.
In response to USA TODAY Sports’ questions, Joos also said the incident at Florida Atlantic was part of Baylor’s decision to dismiss Faulk.
“Faulk has also publicly disclosed that he was the subject of a sexual assault report at Baylor,” Joos said. “When these facts became known to Baylor’s transfer review committee, it recommended he be taken off the football roster and athletic officials agreed to do so.”
In refuting Faulk’s characterization that he was expelled, Bay- lor said he was dismissed from the football team and then withdrew after he missed one class day.
Tate said Faulk went home because he had no place to live and no money. Baylor had not provided Faulk housing when he returned to campus in May for summer school and offseason workouts, Faulk and Tate said, instead telling him to stay with a teammate.
Kinyon, the chairwoman of the panel that restored Faulk’s scholarship, is suing Baylor after being fired in November for what she says was retaliation for that decision. Though her lawsuit does not name Faulk, the details match that of his case.
In Kinyon’s lawsuit, she notes “the allegation of sexual misconduct was the sole motivating factor” for denying Faulk housing before Baylor obtained records from Florida Atlantic that it would use to “attempt to justify” Faulk’s dismissal.
Shan Wu, a former federal prosecutor who frequently represents college and university students accused of disciplinary and academic code violations, said Baylor doesn’t have much of a case in arguing Faulk misled the school about prior conduct.
Wu said it could have been a legitimate course of action to dismiss Faulk from the football team while the Title IX investigation proceeded and then revisit his status based on the outcome of the investigation. Baylor runs into a problem, Wu said, in asserting Faulk’s dismissal was influenced by the Title IX investigation.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” Wu said. “Either you’re saying it’s because of the current allegation, we understand that he has been the subject of a formal complaint, and that’s why (he is dismissed).
“Or nothing, basically, because the other point they tried to rely on — which was the incident at the previous school and the academic probation — as their own appeals committee found, is baseless.”
According to Sokolow, Baylor should have processed the allegation while placing Faulk under interim suspension.
“That’s all we ever wanted for Jeremy,” Sims said. “I can’t tell you that he did something or didn’t do something, because I wasn’t there. But I do know that basically they threw him out the door.” NO RESOLUTION In its findings summary, Pepper Hamilton faulted Baylor for failing to “maintain effective oversight and supervision of the athletics department as it related to the effective implementation of Title IX.”
In Faulk’s case, that pattern seems to have repeated.
In a memo that then-Title IX coordinator Patty Crawford sent to senior vice president and CFO Reagan Ramsower on July 12, she noted that a football player was dismissed and the Title IX office did not learn of that fact until afterward, even though he was the subject of an investigation.
Crawford wrote she asked senior leadership what happened and “how that information was given to many coaches and staff in the football department when our investigation was still confidential.”
Crawford told USA TODAY Sports she could not confirm the identity of the player because of privacy issues but said the student has shared his story in the media.
Crawford resigned in October because she said Baylor officials undermined her efforts to investigate sexual assault complaints and that Baylor was more concerned with its brand than with protecting students.
She filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which launched a Title IX investigation into Baylor’s response to sexual violence.
Kristan Tucker, who was investigating the case and has since been named the Title IX coordinator to replace Crawford, interviewed Faulk with his attorney present July 15, Tate said.
She was thorough and fair, Tate said, adding that Tucker told him “if another school contacts us regarding Jeremy, we will say that Jeremy is in good standing as of today.”
Baylor declined to make Tucker available for comment and declined to answer questions about Tate’s assertion.
Faulk hoped initially that the Title IX investigation would run its course, and, if cleared, Baylor would let him play football for the Bears in 2016. When it became clear that wouldn’t happen, he returned to his junior college.
Baylor advised Faulk on Oct. 20 that the investigation was suspended because he was no longer at the school but that it would be resumed if he reenrolled.
Sokolow said he advises schools that it’s best practice to complete investigations even if respondents leave, something Wu said would be fair to both Faulk and the complainant. Though Faulk said he was contacted by some Division II football programs, Baylor leaving the investigation unresolved effectively prevented Faulk from going to another school.
“Their compliance offices called Baylor, and after that I never heard from them again,” Faulk said.
As football programs at other schools were recruiting Faulk last fall, Tate followed up with Baylor to confirm what Tucker told him. David Alexander, assistant general counsel for Baylor, responded in December to say that Faulk had not been charged with violating the sexual violence policy and that he could take part in the process if he re-enrolled.
As to what Baylor would tell other schools, Alexander said that would depend, in part, on what was asked.
“That’s the most egregious denial of fundamental due process I’ve seen in 38 years of law practice,” Tate said. “It’s just plain old common sense. It just ain’t fair.”
With no path forward in football, Faulk decided in January to declare for the draft.
He trained in Mississippi and took part in the pro day at Pittsburg State University, where his 33 reps of 225 pounds on the bench press were two off the best mark any defensive lineman had at the NFL combine. But Faulk knows there are other factors to consider, that before he can sign with an NFL team he will first have to try to explain a process that remains unresolved and unclear to him.
“I’m just hoping for someone to see what I can do on the field and hire me as a person,” Faulk said. “I just want a fair chance.”
“I’m just hoping for someone to see what I can do on the field and hire me as a person. I just want a fair chance.” Jeremy Faulk, about being chosen in the NFL draft