There were more explosive and repugnant allegations levied Thursday night against the renegade and lawless program Art Briles ran at Baylor, thanks to a lawsuit filed by a former BU football staffer earlier this week. And they are allegations that should further call into question whether Briles should ever have another seat at the collegiate coaching table again -- or any coaching table at any level, for that matter.
A legal filing, released by the university in response to former football director of operations Colin Shillinglaw‘s libel suit, produced emails and text messages that paint a picture of Briles and/or his assistants as unrestrained rogue elements concerned with nothing more than the image of the football program off the field and its performance on it. While most of the attention in this latest damning document dump focuses on Briles attempting to circumvent BU’s “judicial affairs folks” when it came to one player’s arrest... and on Briles asking, in response to one of his players brandishing a gun on a female, “she reporting [it] to authorities?”... and asking “she a stripper?” when told one of his players expected a little something extra from a female masseuse... and stating in a text “we need to know who [the] supervisor is and get him to alert us first” in response to a player who was arrested on a drug charge because the apartment superintendent called the police... more focus should be centered on one aspect of the filing.
In his first statement after his late-May firing in 2016, Briles said the following:From the Houston Chronicle, as part of their report on BU’s latest legal filing:
There were several reports of gang rapes involving football players during Briles’ tenure. The earliest surfaced in 2013, with the victim herself a Baylor athlete. When informed of the allegations, the women’s coach went to Briles. He showed him a list of the players the victim had identified.
Briles response: “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”
Those 11 words -- “those are some bad dudes why was she around those guys” -- perfectly sum up the sad, sordid, sorry tenure of Briles’ time in Waco. Briles recruited and kept “bad dudes” on his football roster, then blamed their victims. Putting broader numbers to it, that’d be 52 acts of rape allegedly committed by 31 “bad dudes” during the last four years of Briles’ tenure according to one lawsuit.
Shame on you, any college football program, that employs a coach who, if he didn’t specifically encourage it, seemingly fostered a sexually violent environment that was at bare minimum tolerated and at worst covered up for the sake of wins and losses.