Baylor is set to go in front of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions at some point soon this spring but the Bears’ former head coach could be the big winner in the entire process according to the school’s ex-athletic director.
Current Liberty AD Ian McCaw spoke with CBS Sports this week and made the rather interesting claim that Art Briles will eventually get a clean bill of health from the NCAA and be a candidate to coach again in college football after the 2019 season.
“I think he’s going to get largely exonerated,” McCaw said of his former coach. “I think people right now are saying, ‘Holy cow, he’s implicated in [covering up] all these sexual assaults and so forth.’ I think the truth is going to be he comes out of the NCAA stuff clean.
“As more information comes out on the Baylor scandal, they’re going to find out [Briles] was scapegoated for a much larger campus wide problem and the failings were in the police department and across campus which is what I know to be the case.”
Briles has largely been radioactive to any sort of football job in the United States after he was fired by Baylor in light of a sprawling sexual assault scandal centered largely on the Bears football program. He was briefly hired by a CFL team for only a few hours in 2017 before public uproar axed that and he eventually had to go to Italy to find work on the field after being named head coach of an American football team in Florence last August.
McCaw, who left Baylor not long after Briles did and has been criticized heavily for his own lack of oversight in Waco, has been increasingly public with claims that officials at the school “scapegoated” black football players and the program itself for being part of a university-wide scandal. BU has gone out of their way to deny these claims a number of times and disagree with McCaw’s portrayal of what went on.
No matter what ends up emerging from the Bears date with the NCAA though, it’s still hard to see Briles returning to the sidelines anytime soon though. The public relations nightmare from even being associated with what went on at Baylor has been enough to draw fan ire whenever he’s even lightly mentioned for a job and any form of absolution from the NCAA will be unlikely to change that given the serious nature of all the accusations from his tenure in Waco.