Baylor’s fumble
A sex scandal reflects a loss of focus at the world’s largest Southern Baptist university.
“Every athlete exercises self-control in all things,” the old coach advised his Corinthian team a couple of eons ago. “They do it to receive a perishable wreath (modern translation: a national championship), but we an imperishable one.” (I Corinthians 9:25)
In its years-long crusade to become the Baptist Notre Dame on the playing field, the largest Southern Baptist university in the world seems to have forgotten the Pauline admonition. Yet again, Baylor University appears to have veered off course as it attempts to navigate between the madness of big-time college sports (paying a football coach almost $6 million annually, for example) and the more becoming mien of Christian moderation envisioned by its early Texan founders more than a centuryand-a-half ago.
Thirteen years after a horrendous murder scandal that nearly destroyed the Bears’ basketball program, the university is accused of failing to respond to rapes or sexual assaults reported by at least six women students from 20092016. This time it’s the football program. At least eight former Baylor football players have been accused of violence against women since the arrival of coach Art Briles from the University of Houston in 2008.
The most successful football coach in the school’s history has come under increasing criticism, but it’s President and Chancellor Ken Starr, not Briles who, according to social-media buzz, is about to walk the plank off the top tier of McLane Stadium and into the Brazos River down below. (In a news release, Baylor complained about rumors and speculation and said an announcement would be forthcoming by June 3.)
Starr came to national prominence two decades ago as the special counsel investigating the sexual shenanigans of then-President Bill Clinton, an investigation that led to Clinton’s impeachment. Ironically, it’s a sexrelated scandal that could cost him his job. He’s been at Baylor since June 2010, during which both Baylor and its Central Texas hometown have prospered mightily, in large part because of the Bears’ spectacular success under Briles.
It’s hard to believe that neither Briles nor Starr was unaware of accusations of violent behavior by football players, hard to believe they weren’t aware that Briles’ program seemed to be tolerating criminal behavior on the part of students representing the university on scholarship. It appears they turned a blind eye.
“Baylor’s athletic department is being accused of establishing an atmosphere in which students believed football players could get away with attacking female students,” Chronicle columnist Jerome Solomon wrote last Sunday. “How sad and disgusting, particularly for a university that proudly waves a religious banner that is supposed to separate it from so many other heathen institutions.”
In his 2015 memoir, “Beating Goliath: My Story of Football and Faith,” Briles takes pride in giving young men who make mistakes a second chance. “I know other schools aren’t necessarily that way,” he writes. “I’ve read plenty of reports about how some colleges run kids off if they have problems. We’ve obviously had some tough choices to make as well. I just know that the first effort is to make sure to help people as much as possible.”
Patience and forbearance are, of course, admirable virtues, but there are limits, even for young men who run a 4.3 40-yard dash.
Whatever the university’s board of regents decides to do about Briles and Starr, Baylor has a duty to release in full the results of a forthcoming investigation into how the athletic department handled reports of rape and assault allegations. Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Baylor grad, issued what the Waco Tribune-Herald called a “muddled May 17 opinion” regarding what the university is required to release.
“Its findings,” Solomon noted in his recent column, “won’t be flattering to the Baylor athletic department.”
If members of the Baylor family examine the report un-blinkered, they might arrive at the unhappy conclusion that a values-focused university cannot compete for that perishable wreath without losing sight of the imperishable. They won’t give up their gridiron crusade, of course, but they’re likely to find big-time college football a perennial thorn in the flesh. St. Paul could identify.