Baylor Scandal Shows College Football Is Too Big To Fail
By Ty Duffy
Baylor has won a lot of football games. An inherent part of that process, it turns out, was Art Briles playing Father Flanagan for troubled, talented football players and the program, the athletic department, and the university exhibiting profound callousness toward the safety and welfare of its female students.
This did not happen at a broad, public bastion of football and moral turpitude. It happened at Baylor, a small, private, religious institution supposed to aspire to something better, or at least more scrutinized.
Full details of Baylor’s independent investigation have not been released. But, it’s safe to say they were damning. Heads on pikes now include the head football coach, the athletic director, and the university president/head cheerleader–the three most powerful figures at Baylor.
The scale, speed, and decisiveness of Baylor’s actions feel incredible. The fact they feel incredible in these circumstances tells much about where we are with college football. So does the college football media’s collective reaction: recoiling in horror, staring at the screen for a long while, tepidly throwing out hypothetical coaching hires for 2017.
Sports Illustrated’s Maggie Gray suggested Baylor take a year off from football to regroup. A former football rape victim called for Baylor to stop playing football altogether. Both suggestions, given the magnitude of this scandal, seem rational and reasonable. Neither will happen.
This has nothing to do with the “student-athletes.” Their concerns, while real, are a bagatelle here. Nor would it have to do with sudden scheduling difficulties for Northwestern State, Liberty, Abilene Christian, and the University of the Incarnate Word.
It’s about money. That could be the money for the $266 million Baylor just spent building its fancy new football stadium. That could be the TV money needed to fund the rest of Baylor’s athletic department. That could be the perceived effect on money from alumni engagement with the academic university in a post-football world.
Baylor football, while hardly big relative to its Power 5 brethren, is too big to fail. We’re too far gone for sheer inhumanity (probably systemic), not to mention frightening ongoing health concerns, to dent the sport. Media outlets, this one included, that could hold football to account, depend on football.
College Football may, someday, face a reckoning. It won’t come through reason. It won’t come through empathy. It will come when the dying embers of the cable television model meet escalating insurance costs. In short, when the money stops.