Baylor: the new word in college sports that nauseates

There's an old truism that the cover-up is far worse than the crime. That definitely fits the bill with the crisis at Baylor, where a series of assaults against women by members of the football team (and others, but mainly the football team) led to the firing of head coach Art Briles and the demotion (reassignment, really) of former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr from his position as university President to university chancellor. He'll also continue to be a professor at the Baylor school of law, and all of this is especially ironic considering where he made his bones as a prosecutor:

Mr. Starr’s demotion delivered a twist to the biography of a man whose reputation was built on what many considered an overzealous pursuit of allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton. Now he is being punished for leading an administration that, according to a report by an outside law firm commissioned by the university’s governing board, looked the other way when Baylor football players were accused of sex crimes, and sometimes convicted of them.

The report (link here) is horrifying enough, but it's made even worse by the fact that - as usual - there's already a squad of numbskulls lining up to support Briles because he is, after all, the coach. If this sounds at all familiar, it should. Because St. Joe Paterno (the greatest man who's ever lived, according to a group of similar-minded dolts) had a whole parcel of losers in the ethical behavior sweepstakes (for example John Ziegler; for another, Franco Harris) lining up to defend him in the wake of the Penn State scandal. The similarities are disturbing enough (again, the leadership teams of a major college sports program and university just sat there with their collective junk in their hands and did next to nothing about the scandal), but the added weight of attempts to coerce the victims into not reporting the assaults only made things that much worse.

And this brings up the following issue: I'm a sports fan. I'm also hardly deaf to the fact that university programs are now (and perhaps always have been) perfectly willing to put the success of their athletic programs above the safety of the general public. I guess I could be optimistic and hope that this, and Penn State, will finally sink in and that the NCAA and individual schools will stop this outright sociopathic behavior once and for all.

I could be optimistic about that.

But I'm not.