Written by Dan Wolken at USA Today.com
Now that the lawsuits are starting to get settled, Art Briles is making noise about coaching again. His attorney, Mark Lanier, even told the Waco Tribune-Herald last week that schools have reached out to the former Baylor coach and practically predicted he’d be back on the sidelines in 2018.
So it’s a good time for another reminder of why that shouldn’t happen — not now, not ever.
And as it happens, that reminder arrives Tuesday in the form of Violated, a new book co-authored by ESPN reporters Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach that offers the most comprehensive account to date of the Baylor sexual assault scandal that brought down Briles, school president and chancellor Ken Starr and athletics director Ian McCaw among others.
Briles, in many ways, isn’t even the book’s main character. As the reporting by Lavigne and Schlabach makes clear, the problems at Baylor were too big and complex to be pinned on one villain, one football team or even one department.
But the role Briles played in aiding and abetting the rotten culture at Baylor — and his lack of answers for how to fix it — should be disqualifying for him to ever work in college athletics again. Though he did not agree to be interviewed for the book, there are more than a dozen pages worth of specific, damning details about how Briles took on players with sketchy histories, actively intervened on their behalf at times to keep them out of trouble and insulated himself at other times from knowledge that might have led Baylor on a different disciplinary course.
Though the book does not provide a smoking gun on Briles’ culpability in covering up sexual assaults, it cites numerous text and e-mail exchanges in which he clearly attempts to keep potential disciplinary problems in-house before they became public.
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