Written by Bill Reiter at CBS Sports.com
Let’s cut to the chase. Within the horror and evil revealed in the latest lawsuit involving Baylor University and its disgraced football program is a hard truth: It’s time for the immediate and permanent dismantling of Baylor football.
Shutter it.
Banish it from existence.
Right now.
I waited through the weekend to write this, not so much to guard against hot-take-ism — that has become a false construct for opinions with which anyone disagrees — but rather to be sure. The horror I felt reading the latest allegations surrounding Baylor football, and what it seemed should come next, were too ugly to rush. I needed time.
Because to remove forever a program like Baylor football is a jarring, searing move — one with financial, practical and other real-life consequences.
But I can’t get past the jarring, searing facts in the latest lawsuit that show just what Baylor football unleashed on its campus and the unfortunate coeds whose lives are permanently damaged. All because an institution meant to teach, nurture and protect them allowed football to be valued over human decency and dignity.
Again and again and again.
The details, as reported by the Waco Tribune:
According to the suit, the football team had a system of hazing freshman recruits by having them bring freshman females to parties to be drugged and gang-raped, “or in the words of the football players, ‘trains’ would be run on the girls.”
Considered a bonding experience by the players, according to the suit, the rapes also were photographed and videotaped, and the plaintiff confirmed that at least one 21-second videotape of two Baylor students being gang-raped by football players had circulated.
Enough is enough. This school does not deserve football. The Big 12 should abhor Baylor as a football member. And the NCAA should recoil from this warped manifestation of the sports-above-all-wink-wink culture that pervades college athletics and that, according to these allegations in the seventh Title IX lawsuit directed at this football program , found its most depraved form.
It’s up to Baylor to self-impose the end of its football program. It sounds impossible to hope a university actually would value important things over sports when those sports become horror shows, but this school is specifically poised to do right — be bold and brave in the face of what would be a vastly unpopular move.
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