Baylor Avoided Drug Testing During Art Briles Tenure

While one can assume a lot more about the scandal that wasn’t previously known will be revealed in the book when it’s released, some new developments are already emerging. One big new piece of information that has come out doesn’t have anything to do with sexual assault.According to ESPN, Violated makes it clear that due to how coaches and school administrators handled the scandal, the school didn’t perform random drug testing for student-athletes. The purpose of the testing is to make sure student-athletes aren’t using marijuana or other recreational drugs.

This is a massive development, because — as ESPN pointed out — Baylor was one of just a few major colleges to NOT randomly drug-test student-athletes when that was the case.

Things get worse for Baylor as Violated details that lack of drug testing. It shows that the Baylor Board of Regents wasn’t aware that the athletic department wasn’t drug testing the student-athletes at first. Eventually, they found out, but only after Pepper Hamilton — the law firm the school hired to look into the sexual assault scandal — discovered the lack of drug testing.

“That was my first realization that this was likely to not end up well,” Baylor regent J. Cary Gray says in Violated.

Violated also details how regent David Harper knew more about the investigation than the other regents and was worried about what the investigation may turn up.

“What was really happening was the underlying message to them is, ‘Hey, the rules don’t apply to you,’” one regent says in Violated. “You know, and they have been hearing that since the seventh grade anyway. Some rules do apply to everybody, and telling them they don’t apply is not calculated to make them productive citizens.”

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