When "Not Guilty" Shows the Defendant is REALLY Guilty

Curmie is way behind on writing. Let’s start his return with a story that received far too little attention when it broke a couple of weeks ago. The NCAA announced a slap on the wrist penalty for Baylor University’s athletics programs after a years-long investigation into allegations that “Baylor shielded football student-athletes from the school’s disciplinary processes and did not report allegations of misconduct by football student-athletes” over a period of several years in the early 2010s. 

Despite finding the university’s “failings” to be “egregious,” the NCAA handed down a series of rather mild sanctions, the most serious of which is four years of probation.  (Let’s face it: a $5000 fine isn’t going to make a very big dent in Baylor's annual budget of about $800 million.)

How we ought to react to this announcement depends very much on where we focus our attention. The NCAA has long been a contender for the world’s most corrupt and incompetent sports organization, vying with the IOC and FIFA for that dubious distinction. (The International Handball Federation may have achieved a fair amount of well-deserved derision for their monumentally sexist insistence that female competitors wear bikini bottoms instead of shorts, but really, who cares about beach handball, which is virtually unknown in the US and isn’t even an Olympic sport?) 

So for the NCAA, with a reputation for over-reaching to dizzying degrees, to admit that they can’t punish Baylor without being able to point to a specific NCAA rule the university broke is something of a breakthrough. True, it took them years to come to this decision, but… baby steps… baby steps. Still, the rationale behind the decision is more than a little chilling. Here’s the key section of the report:

The panel found that those instances of non-reporting did not constitute impermissible benefits to football student-athletes because of a campus-wide culture of nonreporting. That culture was driven by the school’s broader failure to prioritize Title IX implementation, creating an environment in which faculty and staff did not know and/or understand their obligations to report allegations of sexual or interpersonal violence. Because the culture of non-reporting was not limited to cases involving student-athletes, the panel could not find that these instances resulted in impermissible benefits. (emphasis added)

In other words, the university escapes significant penalties for failing to report incidents of sexual violence by football players because they also couldn’t be bothered to report similar cases in which the perpetrators were non-athletes. 

To be sure, there are those who would disagree with the assessment that football players weren’t treated differently than other students would have been. A lawsuit alleged that no fewer than 52 rapes were committed over a six-year period by Baylor football players. That’s a lot. It doesn’t mean they all happened, of course, but it's a pretty damning statistic.  Another suit filed by a former volleyball player who claims to have been drugged and gang-raped by football players alleges that the Baylor program was such that “football players became increasingly emboldened, knowing that they could break the law, code of conduct, and general standards of human decency with no repercussions.” That comment, too, seems to me to be pretty specifically about football players.  (That suit, in case you were wondering, Gentle Reader, was settled out of court with no details released; the unidentified young woman transferred to another school.)  

In this case, by the way, the police, who ought to be the ones investigating the allegations, weren’t even notified. It is reasonable to argue universities not ought to be involved in investigating and reporting serious crimes at all, but Title IX demands that they do so, and the law is the law. But because the university argues it violated federal law on a consistent, across-the-board basis, they cannot be punished by the NCAA for violating the statute as respects felonious jocks, who according to this logic received no special treatment. 

This means, of course, that Baylor will be able to receive millions of dollars in television rights, post-season payouts for bowl games, etc., because they were even worse than previously imagined, creating a truly horrific culture in which not just pampered athletes but the entire student population is insulated against the repercussions of their actions. 

Art Briles: $15 million buyout 
for being an unethical ass

Curmie sees little evidence of contrition on the part of the university. True, they got rid of football coach Art Briles (they also paid him over $15 million as severance, hardly an agreement designed to teach him lesson in ethics!), athletic director Ian McCaw, and university president Ken Starr (yes, that Ken Starr). There were many pious proclamations, stopping just short of clichés about a new sheriff in town. And a couple (but far from even most) of the culprits were indeed brought to trial and convicted. But it’s difficult to believe that more than the names have changed; the culture simply ran (and runs) too deep. 

Baylor was found not guilty of the most serious offenses. They should be far more ashamed of the strategy employed to get that result than of any guilty verdict.  Should be...