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Former Baylor coach Art Briles still doesn't get it
Art Briles is walking around as if he did nothing wrong.
He’s talking as if he was a victim.
It’s repugnant, and it needs to stop.
Briles, who was fired as Baylor’s coach in May, is doing a tour of NFL training camps. On Tuesday, Briles visited Dallas Cowboys training camp, where he proved willing to claim his ignorance and innocence to anyone with a microphone.
Briles also received an endorsement from Jerry Jones and announced that he plans on picking up another coaching job at the end of this upcoming season.
Why would anyone — CFB, NFL, CFL — hire Briles?
"I know who I am,” the former coach said. “I’ve always lived my life in a righteous manner."
Perhaps Briles meant “self-righteous.”
There is a 13-page “Findings of Fact” report from the law firm of Pepper-Hamilton that claims Baylor football coaches “actively divert[ed] cases from the student conduct or criminal processes.”
We’re not dealing with stealing a Coke from the cafeteria — this is in relation to sexual assault. This is the reason Briles was fired. If Baylor could have fired him twice, it would have.
The best-case scenario from that finding — which was one of many that reflected poorly upon Briles and his staff — is that if alleged victims never pressed charges, football players never faced discipline. The worst-case scenario is that Baylor coaches were “actively” covering up crimes.
Either option is obviously unacceptable. Neither option is righteous.
However, Briles — the only coach fired in the fallout — has openly disputed the claims. He claimed wrongful termination, but that claim was quickly settled by the school.
Last week, both Baylor and Briles filed motions to dismiss a civil rights lawsuit that rape victim Jasmin Hernandez, claiming that an individual cannot be sued in a Title IX lawsuit and citing statute of limitations.
Hernandez’s lawyer responded to the motions: “You cannot act with unclean hands and then raise the statute of limitations.”
Hernandez was raped by former Bear Tevin Elliott in 2012, and Elliott was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2014. Hernandez’s Title IX lawsuit claims that Briles and the school knew Elliott had a history of sexual assaults and failed to protect her and other women. It also claims that the school failed to respond when she brought forward the claim of sexual assault.
That might not be the only Title IX case Briles will have to deal with in the coming months. Perhaps he should worry more about those and less about visiting NFL training camps — it’s not as if the NFL is in good standing with RAINN.
Ultimately, this tour of anything-but-reconciliation will probably only backfire on arguably the most successful coach in Baylor history. Briles has yet to back up his claim that he’s been wronged by his former employers, and his comments Tuesday only serve to paint him as disconnected from reality.
Take the next few plays off, Art.
