We slam the words together — college football — and fail to notice which word comes first. If you’ve gone to a particular school, you should know there are reasons for that institution to exist beyond autumn Saturdays. Sometimes, though, the Color and Pageantry of those Saturdays not only overwhelms the senses but overrides all good sense.
Word circulated Monday that Baylor boosters are trying to bring back Art Briles, who has been deposed as coach but not yet fired, for the 2017 season. It’s unclear how many boosters constitute this bloc, but even if it’s a bloc of one, it’s one too many.
Art Briles won a lot of games on autumn Saturdays. He was deposed because an outside investigation revealed that Baylor's football program had become a place where sexual abuse was tolerated and victims were vilified. The fallout from the findings was so swift and sweeping that chancellor and president Kenneth Starr was stripped of the latter post and has resigned from the former. The athletic director was suspended and later resigned.
The belief then and now was that there was no punishment too great for Baylor. (The same Baptist school’s basketball program saw one player murder another and then-coach Dave Bliss participate in a cover-up.) But here we are, not three weeks later, and already there’s a push to bring back the coach. To borrow from John McEnroe: You cannot be serious.
As Baylor interim president David Garland told Mike Leslie of Dallas TV station WFAA: "A lot of fans love what the coach did on the football field, and you can understand that. But other factors have to be taken into consideration."
Well, yes. There’s the occasionally inconvenient truth that colleges exist for a greater purpose than running up the score on Kansas.
Said Garland: “This is not an institution of football. It is an institution of higher education, and we happen to play football. Our major mission is to educate students. That’s what we want the focus to be on. And also to protect the safety of our students.”
You’d think those words would be such a given they’d never need to be spoken. But with every passing year we’re bombarded with more evidence that the tail isn’t just wagging the dog but has become the dog itself. Football coaches earn more money than school presidents. ESPN paid $7.3 billion for the rights to the College Football Playoff and its New Year’s Six bowls. The SEC has its own network. The Texas Longhorns have their own network.
Coaches use private jets and helicopters to recruit teenagers, some of whom mightn’t gain college admission if they didn’t happen to play football. Coaches live in fear that another program will gain a precious recruiting advantage. (Hence the furor over satellite camps.)
The mighty SEC felt moved to enact a rule barring transfers from one member institution to another of players who’d been disciplined for domestic violence or sexual abuse. Again, you’d have thought no rule was needed, that common sense would have prevailed. But it was Nick Saban — the sport’s biggest and best coach, the man who delivers speeches on “leadership” — who welcomed Jonathan Taylor, a defensive lineman who was arrested for domestic violence and dismissed by Georgia, to Alabama.
Having covered college football since 1976 renders this correspondent guilty of cognitive dissonance — knowing that much of what happens in the sport is unseemly but still liking the games themselves. Sometimes, though, clarity cuts through the Color and Pageantry. You see a school like Baylor and you think, “Is it really possible that educated adults can care so much about a silly game that they’d sacrifice human decency to win?”
But you already know the answer. You’ve known for 40 years. Is it possible? Sure it is.
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