Fort Worth teems with good people. I was born and raised in Cowtown and can’t imagine a more warm-hearted bunch of folks.
Persons of quality character – like the ones in Funkytown –
can often resist the temptation to compromise their morals for the sake
of worldly gain. It’s best if they don’t have to, though. A little over
20 years ago, circumstances kept a group of locals from having to make
some choices that certain neighbors of ours haven’t handled well.
You’ve perhaps followed recent
developments in Baylor football. Over the last year, an apparent
pattern of widespread misconduct in the supervision of the football
program has led to personnel changes and lawsuits. The most recent
allegations, if true, illuminate a culture in which conscience seemed to
have had no place in the discussion. They also indicate that such attitudes
were held by top school administrators, coaches, boosters, and even
local law enforcement personnel. The ethically indifferent approach
seems to have facilitated sexual assaults and other offensive crimes.
Make
no mistake, we’re talking about serious charges. This is not buying a
bus ticket for a player to go see his family for the holidays. This
isn’t even letting him drive a free Lexus. This is actual criminal
activity.
Some people’s jobs depended on football success. The
boosters may have done it for the chance to feel reflected glory from a
school they used to attend. They all allegedly decided those rewards
outweighed any potential long-term repercussions or personal sense of
shame.
The Waco university has experienced scandal before. In 2003,
a former Baylor basketball player killed a teammate. A corrupt coach
tried to use the murder to help him cover up NCAA violations. In 2012, both the men’s and women’s basketball programs received sanctions from the governing body.
The Baylor Bears compete in the Big 12 conference, one of
the country’s top five Division 1 athletic conferences. Since its
formation, the league’s schools have won national titles in 17 different
sports (including two by Baylor in women’s hoops). Competing for such
stakes intensifies the pressure to win. It also boosts the potential
reward for boosters’ egos and staffers’ career paths.
So how does all of this concern TCU and nice Fort Worth people? Well, Baylor got into
the Big 12 in large part because TCU did not. That happened back in
1996 and at the time caused a great deal of local upset. TCU trudged off
to the Western Athletic Conference, then Conference USA and the
Mountain West before recently winding up in the conference that had shut
them out before.
Over those years, TCU kept a lower profile than its
neighbor 90 minutes to the south. That had to be frustrating for Frog
fans, but not competing against the UTs, A&Ms, and Techs in
high-stakes matchups also kept it out of emotionally-charged rivalries
with those huge taxpayer-financed institutions. Horned Frogs didn’t have
to hear from Longhorns or Aggies about getting trounced year after year
in the marquee sports like Bears supporters did.
I think that was a good thing for TCU. If they had been
the lone private school to get into the Big 12, they would have had to
endure the heightened expectations of trying to compete as the smallest
member of the conference against subsidized rivals – as Baylor did. Less
pressure means less incentive to find a way to work around the rules,
be they ones of athletic associations or common decency. The Frogs have
gradually built up some remarkable football achievements in the
Franchione/Patterson era with a sparse record of disciplinary hiccups.
As noted earlier, Fort Worth is full of good people. The
Horned Frogs might well have avoided a moral crisis no matter what
conference they occupied the last 20-odd years. We do, however, have to
keep in mind what happened to bring about the demise of the league they
had joined in 1923.
The Southwest Conference collapsed in part because of the prestige its members lost due to widespread NCAA violations.
TCU had its own 1980s transgressions, thanks to boosters paying
student-athletes behind coach Jim Wacker’s back. But it’s another
Christian school that might provide the best cautionary note. Southern
Methodist’s delinquent culture didn’t result in criminal charges, but
they did implicate the governor of Texas (Bill Clements) and the
sanctions they received forced the cancellation of two full football
seasons – the death penalty. Incidentally,
the Mustangs’ men’s basketball coach for much of that era was found to
have committed multiple violations at the school in his sport in the
1980s. Dave Bliss repeated that modus operandi when he coached Baylor in
the early 2000s, culminating with his appalling approach to a homicide.
TCU doesn’t have to repeat past errors, whether their own
or someone else’s. Hopefully for the Frogs, those years away from
competing with their bigger in-state rivals have helped the university
establish a healthy atmosphere for its athletic programs. Now that they
are once again facing top-level foes in the Big 12, they will need it.
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