Stanford has to fire Troy Taylor after bullying investigations

Stanford head football coach Troy Taylor was the subject of two separate investigations into his conduct towards female staffers, according to a report from Xuan Thai of ESPN.

According to the reports obtained by ESPN, Taylor "bullied and belittled female athletic staffers, sought to have an NCAA compliance officer removed after she warned him of rules violations and repeatedly made "inappropriate" comments to another woman about her appearance."

According to the reports, Taylor's temper was a source of much stress in the athletic department, particularly towards the Compliance Department and other female staff members. The compliance office was a particular target of Taylor's ire, and the second investigator said that he had never encountered "this palpable level of animosity and disdain" for a compliance office, despite working with multiple division one and Power Four programs in the past.

Taylor believed the compliance department was unfairly targeting him, but the investigation found no evidence of any sort of bias in their enforcement. They did find that the program had multiple low-level NCAA violations and was "not welcoming to women," and also not "welcoming to anyone ... who cannot dedicate unrestricted time to the program," regardless of their gender.

All of this is a long way of saying that there's absolutely no reason why Taylor should still be employed by the Cardinal to run their football program. His behavior is unacceptable, and the fact that it continued to happen after the first investigation shows that he has no real interest in changing, beyond keeping up appearances to save his job.

Coaching in general, but coaching football in particular, can attract a specific kind of person. College football coaches have a tendency toward authoritarian behavior, wanting to control as much as they can, and the history of coaches with explosive tempers and generally hostile personalities is long and storied. But there's a difference between being a hothead, and being an irascible asshole, and Taylor seems to fall into the latter camp.

Despite what Taylor seems to think, it is possible to win football games without being a miserable prick to everyone around you, and without treating the compliance office like dirt.

Stanford can't even point to a track record of success with Taylor to try and justify keeping him around; the Cardinal have gone 3-9 in both of his two seasons, and seem likely to head for another sub-.500 season next year under him as well.

So, it begs the question: what are we doing here? Why are they keeping a guy who has yet to show he can win, who also treats staffers as inferiors and targets of scorn and ire? Is there not a character clause in his contract?

I get that it's hard to win at Stanford; recruiting is tricky, the money situation isn't ideal, and the academic standards are such that it's going to be hard to bring in the kind of elite athletes you get at other schools.

But surely it's not such an impossible task that you have to keep employing someone like Taylor, despite repeated examples proving that he doesn't know how to treat people. Actions have consequences, even if you're the head football coach, and Taylor needs to learn that you can't scream at people just because they say you can't do things you want to do.

Maybe Taylor will learn from his mistakes, and start treating people around him better. Maybe the investigations are what he needs to realize his behavior is unacceptable. But if his time at Stanford is any indication, it seems unlikely that anything's going to change unless the Cardinal decide to make one.

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