A Texas sports journalist puts the rape scandal at Baylor in perspective for us. (UD‘s comments appear in brackets.)
********************
So am I calling Art [Briles, Baylor football coach,] a liar?
Yes, I’m calling him a big-time college head football coach in the same classification as Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, Bob Stoops, Jimbo Fisher, etc. [These are all the biggies, plus etc. – i.e., pretty much everyone else.]
Check their rosters. [Plenty of scary people on them. But c’mon on: The Steelers just signed Michael Vick.] These are coaches who will always gamble on talent over character, and when that talent brings trouble to campus, the talent will be protected and coddled. These coaches just don’t care, and they are powerful enough they don’t have to care.
Art doesn’t have to care at Baylor. And it’s paid off big time for him and the school.
Well, it was paying off. Except now, all hell has broken loose.
Briles, however, won’t stop gambling on bad actors, even now, unless at some point, he’s ordered to stop. But who exactly gives that order in Waco? [Baylor president] Ken Starr?
On that leave ’em laughing note, we know heads will roll over all this. And we know Art will be watching from a Waco safe place, high above it all. [Hilarious to think that the official head of a football factory has any power. The God who stands above it all directing and watching is the coach. UD read somewhere – can’t find the link – that a sacrificial woman from somewhere in the administration has been selected to suffer for her Art.] [Good one, UD.]
*******************
Remember: This guy is writing about a place that was founded as a university.
*******************
Oh. And here’s a great blast from the past. In a recent tussle with his league over their team ranking system (it placed Texas Christian, the place Briles found Baylor’s most famous rapist, over Baylor), Briles said
[The league is] obligated to us because we’re helping the Big 12’s image in the nation.
Totally, Art, and keep up the good work.
August 30th, 2015 at 12:17PM
The irony of all of this is that college football in the aggregate might be big business, but on any given campus, including the tiny number that actually make money, it is actually tiny, tiny money. People who talk about how much football (or basketball) makes for the university have no clue that we are often talking losses and when we talk profits we are talking relatively tiny amounts — a few million dollars at universities with hundreds of millions flowing through the doors. People get blinded by what seem like big numbers — the University of Texas football program is a $125 million or so a year endeavor, but when all is said and done it clears maybe $20 million, and that is the best any team does (at least those are the most recent numbers I’ve seen). Yet the University of Texas deals with more than a billion dollars a year. Football has influence, but it really, really shouldn’t even on its own terms of debate. And forget about those places where football is an absolute resource-vacuum. Why on earth should anyone care a bit about a program that costs an institution money — especially since the further one gets from the flagships, the more likely it is that those schools don’t really have the capacity to absorb those losses.
And I say this as a conflicted fan of both football on the whole and of college football. Imagine if we still had football, but we just scaled it back? If everyone had to scale it back, no programs would suffer all that much. I dunno — it’s frustrating, because even on its own terms, football simply shouldn’t have influence, never mind the influence that it does.
dcat