The Baylor football scandal timeline

Southern Miss’ mess boils down to this: head coach Jay Hopson wanted to hire former Baylor head coach Art Briles to his staff. His administration did not.

Briles presided over a Baylor program that was mired in years-long sexual assault scandals with multiple players. A timeline of the scandal can be found here.

No.

No, there are other coaches who did not oversee programs during years-long sexual assault scandals.

The NCAA sent Baylor a Notice of Allegations that the school broke NCAA rules in the course of the rape scandal that led to football coach Art Briles’ firing, according to a report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. We don’t yet have a copy of any documents the NCAA sent the school, but the newspaper says they include two familiar charges:

The school fired Briles in May 2016, 28-plus months before this report. The football team is on its second head coach since Briles; Jim Grobe served as the interim for a full year in 2016, and the school hired Temple coach Matt Rhule before 2017.

On Monday morning, the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats announced the hiring of former Houston and Baylor head coach Art Briles, who was fired in May 2016 amid the Bears’ program-wide sexual assault scandal, as an offensive assistant. But Briles won’t join Hamilton after all, according to the league. Its statement on Monday night:

After his firing, Baylor remained vague about Briles’ exact doings. In Oct. 2016, a Wall Street Journal report offered some clarity:

It’s now been a year since Baylor got back the findings of a law firm’s investigation into BU’s Title IX compliance and allegations of sexual violence by its football players. That report led to the firings of head football coach Art Briles, athletic director Ian McCaw, and university president Ken Starr.

On the anniversary of that report’s release, ESPN’s Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach published an interesting story, titled, “What lessons has Baylor learned?”

Baylor has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that alleges 52 rapes by 31 Baylor football players over a four-year span between 2011 and 2014. Baylor’s filing was first reported by Deadspin.

According to the motion, the school’s attorneys filed based on the grounds of statute of limitations.

Dino Babers started as Syracuse’s head football coach last season. He was an assistant at Baylor from 2008 to 2011, then he moved to become the head coach at Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green. Babers’ reputation for a prolific, fast-paced offense similar to Art Briles’ helped him land the head job at Syracuse.

As part of an interview profile with Babers, SB Nation’s Richard Johnson asked about Baylor. These appear to be Babers’ most extensive public comments on Baylor since Briles’ firing last May. Part of Babers’ response:

Even with a new head coach, Baylor’s football program just keeps finding its way into the headlines. On Monday evening, KXTX-TV News 10 in Waco reported Baylor has dismissed DeMarkco Butler, who was hired just last month as the Associate Director for Football Operations.

The nature of Butler’s dismissal involves inappropriately texting a teenager. However, a school official told the television station that under Texas state laws, the individual is an adult.

Baylor’s women’s basketball team clinched the Big 12 regular season title on Saturday, and the Bears’ coach, Kim Mulkey, gave a postgame speech on the court in Waco. Mulkey used the occasion to offer a defense of her school, which has spent most of the last year embroiled in a sexual assault scandal that’s still unfolding in court.

“If somebody around you and they ever say, ‘I will never send my daughter to Baylor,’ you knock them right in the face,” Mulkey told fans to applause and cheers. “Because these kids are on this campus. I work here. My daughter went to school here, and it’s the damn best school in America.”

The Trump administration is considering appointing former Baylor president Ken Starr as ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, Foreign Policy reported on Thursday. Starr sounds like the frontrunner for the job, which is a sad thing and a bad idea.

Starr first rose to national prominence for his investigations of Bill Clinton while the latter was president in the 1990s. He’d also been a federal judge and George H.W. Bush’s chief lawyer before the Supreme Court.

The Big 12 announced Wednesday that it will be keeping 25 percent of the conference revenue distribution Baylor is entitled to until it can verify via a third party that the Bears have indeed restructured their athletic program procedures and governance after the sexual assault scandal involving the football program.

In 2016, Big 12 schools each got $30.4 million from the conference, a slice of the $304 million pie that had jumped significantly from 2015.

Three Baylor University regents filed their response to a defamation suit filed against them and the school, including Pepper Hamilton, by a former athletic department administrator. Colin Shillinglaw, Baylor’s former Assistant Athletics Director for Football Operations, was fired last year. He handled various day-to-day operations within the football program, and worked with former head coach Art Briles, in some instances directly, in handling allegations of player misconduct.

The 54-page document, which was published via the Houston Chronicle, paints a startling picture of the football program as a whole, including claims of systematic misconduct by Briles. Briles, who was fired last May amid the sexual assault allegations that surfaced around the program, dropped his libel suit against a group of university officials on Wednesday.

Former Baylor football coach Art Briles has dropped a lawsuit against a group of university officials, a lawyer of his announced Wednesday:

Baylor fired Briles amid a sexual assault scandal in May 2016. In December, he filed a libel and conspiracy suit against three university regents and a vice president.

New Florida Atlantic head coach Lane Kiffin is making longtime Baylor assistant Kendal Briles his offensive coordinator, according to multiple reports. The first:

Briles is the son of former Baylor head coach Art Briles, whom Baylor fired during a sexual assault scandal in May. The report Baylor commissioned to investigate its football program said “some football coaches and staff took improper steps in response to disclosures of sexual assault or dating violence that precluded the University from fulfilling its legal obligations” under Title IX. But Briles’ staff of assistants, including his son, stayed intact through the 2016 season.

Former Baylor football coach Art Briles is suing three Baylor regents and the school’s vice president for administration and finance, alleging libel and a conspiracy to keep him from getting another job in coaching.

Briles’ suit accuses the regents, specifically, of falsely telling media outlets the coach was aware of alleged gang rapes by Baylor players and didn’t properly report them.

Baylor has found its next head coach. Temple head coach Matt Rhule was named the Bears’ new head coach for 2017 after leading the Owls to an American Athletic Conference title, the program’s first conference title since 1967, and the school’s first-ever back-to-back 10-win seasons. According to ESPN’s Brett McMurphy, Rhule has received a seven-year deal from Baylor.

“We could not be more excited to welcome Matt, Julie and their children to the Baylor Family,” Baylor athletic director Mark Rhoades announced in the school’s official release. “When we set out on our search for a new leader of our football program, we wanted a coach who shared our values, who had demonstrated success, who showed a true commitment to the overall student-athlete and who we believed could lead Baylor to a national championship. We found all of that and more in Matt and I know that he will be a perfect fit with the Baylor Family.”

“Earlier this week, Art Briles expressed interest to me regarding the Houston head coach position,” Houston athletic director Hunter Yurachek said in a statement. “After discussion with University of Houston leadership, we developed a list of candidates to be interviewed that did not include Art. At this time, we will have no further comment on potential candidates or timeline.”

ESPN’s Brett McMurphy cited “strong interest” in reporting Saturday that Briles will interview with UH.

Liberty University announced the hiring of athletic director Ian McCaw, who resigned from the same position at Baylor amid the school’s sexual assault scandal.

Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr.’s quote in the school statement:

On Friday, Baylor released a statement following a Dallas Morning News story released earlier this month.

In the statement, the school argues former athletic director Ian McCaw, former football coach Art Briles, and another “sports administrator” did not follow protocol after being told of the alleged sexual assault of a woman student-athlete by five football players.

No. 11 Oklahoma and Baylor got into some sort of shoving-and-jawing match before their game on Saturday.

“Baylor’s in another fight,” ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit said, feigning surprise, when a clip of the shoving aired on College GameDay.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the NCAA will not at this time discipline Baylor in the wake of the football team’s sexual assault scandal.

That’s a fair question to ask of the institution that hammered Penn State, only later to renege on these wide-ranging sanctions.

It’s been more than five months since Baylor fired Art Briles at the height of a scandal over Briles’ football program’s handling of sexual assault allegations against players. When Baylor fired Briles, the school didn’t provide answers on exactly what Briles had done wrong, and information has only recently started to trickle out.

On Oct. 28, the Wall Street Journal reported Briles had been notified of an alleged gang rape, one of several involving Baylor players. Briles, according to the report, didn’t notify the school’s judicial affairs or Title IX office.

In May, Baylor’s firing of head coach Art Briles came alongside a report by a third-party law firm that unnamed “football coaches or staff met directly with a complainant [as in, a person describing a sexual assault] and/or a parent of a complainant and did not report the misconduct.”

Briles’ exit never resolved that part of the report, seeing as he was just one coach, singular. A week after the report, Baylor quietly fired two non-coach staffers. The question of alleged involvement by other actual coaches remains unanswered, as has the question of exactly what Briles did.

Former Baylor coach Art Briles showed up at Cleveland Browns practice on Wednesday as a guest coach, Cleveland.com’s Mary Kay Cabot reported, as part of a temporary stint with the franchise.

Baylor fired Briles in disgrace in May, when a scandal came to a head over Briles’ program’s treatment of sexual assault allegations against Baylor football players. Since then, Briles has said he wants to get back into coaching, and now Browns coach Hue Jackson is giving him at least a temporary opportunity.

You’ll recall that Baylor, at the height of an institutional sexual assault scandal earlier this year, fired head football coach Art Briles.

In the days before Briles lost his job in disgrace, he posted in May from his now-defunct Twitter account a graphic touting his program’s academic success, hashtagged #TruthDontLie.