We are being told again -- and no one should be surprised by this -- that it’s a great deal easier to fire a university president in Texas than it is to fire a winning football coach.
Baylor won’t make it official yet, but it has fired president Ken Starr, and now the argument begins. What will they do with head football coach Art Briles?
And all because Baylor players have been raping women in Waco, and those two men did little about it if anything at all.
When Briles was hired in 2008, Baylor hadn’t had a winning season since 1995. They had won 11 Big 12 Conference games in 12 years. Three years later, Briles had Baylor in a bowl game, and now they’re one of the top 10 teams in college football.
His critics will tell you he wins because he cares only about what his players do on a football field, and looks the other way when they’re off the field. And that he brings in players that have been in trouble before.
His supporters will ask, “How could he have possibly known?”
Winning football games means a great deal in Texas. But it’s a story we’ve heard at too many universities from coast to coast and border to border. We’ve heard it in the professional game a lot, and even in our high schools.
And I’m sick of it. And I’m disgusted that too many of you aren’t sick of it too.
Our daughters are being abused. The little girl who used to live next door grow up to get attacked on campus, and yet too many football coaches continue to say they didn’t know, and ask what they really could’ve done if they did.
Winning football coaches have such a great place in our society. They make a great deal more than our university presidents because we like what they do a great deal more.
But when they don’t do anything to protect our daughters, and when they put winning above the safety of the young women who walk their campus, when they continue to say they’re doing the best they can and their best isn’t nearly enough, we need to find another coach who will.
They’re hard to find. But if they’re not willing, there has to be someone else out there who is.
I like Art Briles, I always have. But he has failed the women at Baylor. He has failed the university. And you can’t win enough games to make up for that.
I get in trouble when I quote liberals, but I am one so I will. Bobby Kennedy said many times:
Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?’