Carpe Datum

Baylor Busted

Big news around here lately has been the big mess going on at Baylor. One of their basketball players turned up dead with two bullets to the head, and that kicked off an investigation into the whole program. As the local radio stations talked about it, indignant callers (Baylor alums, of course) would come on the air and rant about how dare anyone question Baylor about wrongdoing here. Baylor is, after all, a private fundamentalist Baptist school. A "Christian school" as those callers would say.

As if Baylor is a different animal from all the other programs involved in NCAA athletics. Sorry, Baylor folks, you're down in the gutter with everyone else, and you knew you would have to be in order to compete in the Big 12 athletic conference, where you are still way outclassed by the much higher order of corruption and money at places like Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, etc. Hell, you don't even know how to cheat well enough, and you pretend that you are holier than thou.

Turns out it was a lot worse than even I guessed:

Before he resigned as Baylor University's basketball coach, Dave Bliss directed players to provide investigators with false information indicating that slain teammate Patrick Dennehy had paid his tuition by dealing drugs, according to conversations secretly recorded by an assistant coach.

"What we've got to create here is drugs," Bliss said in one of the conversations, which were taped by assistant coach Abar Rouse with a concealed microcassette recorder on July 30 and 31 and Aug. 1.

The tapes also reveal that Bliss knew some players smoked marijuana and that Baylor coaches weren't truthful when they made public statements indicating they had no knowledge of threats allegedly made against Dennehy by Harvey Thomas, the heralded junior-college recruit who arrived in Waco in late spring.

Turns out it was another teammate who supposedly killed Dennehy. Bliss commented on the tapes that they could say pretty much anything they want about Dennehy. Since he's dead, he can't refute it. Needless to say, Dennehy's family are not happy campers. Now we get to watch all the other coaches in the region shake their heads for the media in disbelief and shock, as if they aren't cheating, too. They should just pay the damned players, but that's another post.

Posted by Observer at August 16, 2003 04:15 PM