Questions for Vols now are serious, too
KNOXVILLE — Until Tuesday night, this was shaping up to be the University of Tennessee’s sweetest, happiest, least stressful football spring since 1999, which followed the 1998 national championship season.
It officially began with that rousing Outback Bowl victory over Northwestern. Multiple way-too-early 2016 projections almost immediately predicted the Volunteers to be a top-10 program this coming season. A few media types (blush, blush) even argued they could play Clemson in the national championship game.
Then it got so much better during early February with another banner recruiting class for fourth-year head coach Butch Jones and Peyton Manning winning the Super Bowl for the second time.
It was great, indeed, to be a Tennessee Vol.
And it may yet remain that way.
But it also may all come crashing down after Tuesday’s news that a federal lawsuit was filed in Nashville by six unnamed female students — five of whom say they were raped — that claims the University of Tennessee violated Title IX and other federal laws with its “deliberately indifferent actions” before and after the alleged incidents.
Though the ongoing rape case involving former Vols A.J. Johnson and Michael Williams seems to be at the center of the lawsuit, other cited incidents of UT’s supposed indifference in this area reportedly go back to Peyton Manning’s infamous “mooning” incident involving a female athletic trainer that later resulted in a six-figure settlement for that trainer.
But it’s the Johnson-Williams case that could have the entire university on the defensive throughout the 2016 football season and beyond, given that the wheels of justice
sometimes turn at the speed of partially frozen sludge.
There’s even a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga angle to this story, because former Vols receiver Drae Bowles, who transferred to UTC before last season, was reportedly roughed up by his teammates after convincing the plaintiff in the Johnson-Williams case to go to the police.
According to the lawsuit, Bowles was supposedly beaten up not once but twice, and former UT player Orlando Orta told police that Bowles “had betrayed the team and that where he (Orta) came from, people got shot for doing what Bowles did.”
Again, this is what’s in the complaint. The police interviews are still under wraps because the case is ongoing. There are, however, no incident reports involving any retaliation strikes against Bowles. The player also dismissed the notion he’d been assaulted by teammates during an interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel last winter.
Yet even if Bowles was assaulted by his teammates, the big issue for the University of Tennessee is whether or not such behavior was ordered by paid members of the UT coaching staff, a sort of Code Orange for Bowles turning on his fellow Vols For Life.
However unfortunate and unsettling it may be that nearly grown men would put personal friendships and team camaraderie above the horror of rape, that’s not nearly as disturbing as coaches and/or administrators attempting to cover up such criminal behavior for the misplaced good of the program.
And if that was done, any coach or employee found guilty of promoting or condoning such behavior should be immediately fired and possibly prosecuted for aiding in the possible cover-up of a crime. Even the claim that Jones told the team not to talk to Bowles raises red flags if proven true, since all indications are Bowles was merely attempting to help a fellow UT student-athlete whom he believed had been raped.
If this singular point is proven true, it goes to the plaintiffs’ claims that a “hostile sexual environment” existed on campus.
After all, wouldn’t it have been nice to learn that when Jones first heard of the Johnson-Williams incident and Bowles’ attempt to help the young woman, the coach gathered the Vols together and said, “While we pray that A.J. and Michael are proven innocent, we want to salute Drae for stepping up to help a friend, and we hope the rest of you would do exactly the same thing if you felt a crime had been committed by any of your teammates. We are about doing the right thing all the time at the University of Tennessee.”
Instead, we have these troubling accusations and at least enough smoke to believe there are a few red embers out there.
That doesn’t mean anyone in charge has necessarily done anything wrong. It might mean that future cases such as these should be handled outside the university proper, where the need to protect something as financially powerful as the athletic department will always invite charges that any ruling in favor of an accused athlete might have been different if heard by folks unconnected to the school.
The only thing certain at this point is that a UT football spring that figured to be all sweetness and light is now filled with nervousness and concern. The trials of Johnson (July 18) and Williams (June 27) are still months away, and the federal lawsuit is almost certain to last well beyond that.
Thus is life on Rocky Top once more rocky. Thus does the argument that football builds character again come under fire.
To which we add this thought: If Jones and every other college football coach were smart, the last words their players would see and hear as they left their locker rooms following practices and games would be these: “Remember, No means No.”
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.