Baylor University, where sexual assault was horrifyingly common in the football program in the 2010s, did not break NCAA rules when it failed to report accusations against players, the association concluded Wednesday.
The decision, rooted in the intricacies and omissions of the bylaws that govern about 1,100 colleges and universities, brought to an end an inquiry that threatened significant penalties for Baylor’s athletic program. Ultimately, though, the investigation showed the limits of the NCAA’s power, even in a case where a university acknowledged repeated errors and saw top leaders depart in disgrace.
The resolution was reminiscent of the NCAA’s approach in 2017, when it said it could not punish the University of North Carolina for a pervasive academic fraud scandal — a decision that provoked scorn, disbelief and arguments about whether the NCAA wielded much authority at all on some of the weightiest issues to intersect with college sports.
The broad outlines of what transpired at Baylor were not in dispute. In 2016, a law firm that the university had hired found that leaders of Baylor’s football program sometimes “affirmatively chose not to report sexual violence” to the appropriate authorities and that team officials had moved to “divert cases from the student conduct or criminal processes.”
But those choices, an NCAA committee wrote in its 51-page ruling, took place at a university that had a “campus-wide culture of sexual violence” that had gone “unaddressed due to ignorance and leadership failings across campus.” In turn, the committee said it had decided “with tremendous reluctance” that Baylor’s acknowledged “moral and ethical failings in its handling of sexual and interpersonal violence on campus” did not amount to violations of NCAA rules because the university’s missteps were not limited to student-athletes.
“Any expansion of the NCAA’s authority in this area is not a decision that should be made by the seven volunteer members of this panel on behalf of nearly 1,100 member institutions,” the committee said.
On a conference call Wednesday afternoon, Joel Maturi, the chief hearing officer in the Baylor case and a former athletic director at the University of Minnesota, characterized some of the wrongdoing as “crimes” and said that the allegations had been “serious, troubling and unacceptable.”
The committee, though, insisted it could do no more than punish Baylor for a handful of violations involving academic and recruiting rules. The penalties that the committee imposed for those offenses included four years of probation and a $5,000 fine.
In an open letter to university supporters on Wednesday, Baylor leaders said they “sincerely regret the actions of a few individuals caused harm to so many.”
“While the NCAA process found violations that occurred between 2011 and 2016, we can confidently say Baylor is a much different university today than it was three, five and certainly 10 years ago,” the officials, President Linda A. Livingstone, and the athletic director, Mack B. Rhoades IV, wrote.
The allegations around Baylor’s football program, which have led to some criminal cases and convictions, were shocking in their scope and violence when they surged into the national consciousness in 2015 and 2016. University regents said years ago that at least 19 players had been accused of sexual misconduct since 2011, a figure that some people have suggested was an undercount, and investigators found that Baylor officials had tried to shield players from scrutiny by the university or law enforcement.
The crisis ultimately led to the resignations or firings of the university’s president, Ken Starr, who had been the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton; its football coach, Art Briles; and the athletic director, Ian McCaw.
Although the NCAA committee wrote that Briles had “failed to meet even the most basic expectations of how a person should react to the kind of conduct at issue in this case,” a lawyer for the coach said Wednesday that Briles had been “exonerated and cleared of all NCAA violations.” The lawyer, Scott Tompsett, added that Wednesday’s decision “clears the way for Mr. Briles to return to coaching college football.”
In a text message, McCaw said that it was “tragic that Baylor’s decades-long, campus-wide sexual assault scandal arose due to systemic failings.” Starr, who told the NCAA committee that Baylor’s shortcomings had amounted to “a colossal operational failure,” said Wednesday that he found the panel’s final report “very thorough.” He declined additional comment.
In addition to the scrutiny by the NCAA, Baylor, whose campus is in Waco, Texas, has faced a criminal inquiry and a wave of civil litigation related to the sexual assaults. Baylor prevailed in one of those cases in June when a jury in Houston determined that, under a state law, the university was not responsible for the sexual assault of a woman in 2017.
But Baylor has been penalized in other ways. In October, for instance, the U.S. Department of Education fined the university more than $461,000 in connection with violations of a federal law that governs campus crime statistics. The university has also reached settlements with some women who brought claims under Title IX, the federal law that effectively prohibits sexual harassment and assault in educational settings.
The NCAA case, though, still loomed.
Less than a decade ago, the NCAA intervened in another high-profile case of sexual misconduct. In 2012, it veered from its traditional disciplinary process and fined Penn State $60 million and imposed a four-year postseason ban on the football program because of how the university mishandled the child sexual abuse scandal that involved Jerry Sandusky, a longtime assistant coach. At the time, the association’s president, Mark Emmert, said that football would “never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people.”
About two years later, after sustained criticism that it had overreached, the association reduced some of the penalties, including the postseason restrictions, because of what officials said they regarded as the university’s good behavior.
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