Let’s lead with what apparently bears repeating: Art Briles was fired as the football coach at Baylor in 2016 after an independent investigation of multiple sexual assaults involving Baylor student-athletes concluded Briles and his staff did not report their knowledge of those incidents to authorities.
According to the investigation, the leadership of the football team “hindered enforcement of rules and policies, and created a cultural perception that football was above the rules.”
On Saturday evening, Oklahoma offensive coordinator (and former Baylor assistant) Jeff Lebby stood defiant in front of the Sooners’ press corps when pressed on the attendance of his father-in-law, Briles, who was spotted on the Sooners’ sideline after their win over SMU wearing Oklahoma apparel.
“That’s my father-in-law,” Lebby told reporters. “So he’s the grandfather to my two kids. So he was down with our entire family after the game, well after the game, but he was down there with the entire family.”
When pressed by a reporter who stated, “Jeff, I think there’s going to be people who have trouble squaring that, because …” Lebby interjected: “Again, he’s with his entire family. That’s my father-in-law. That’s the grandfather to my two kids.”
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By Monday afternoon, Lebby’s stance and tone had predictably changed, after both Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables and Athletic Director Joe Castiglione expressed a mix of concern and confusion at Briles’s presence Saturday night. Lebby issued an apology, specifically (and only) for “something that created a distraction.”
Believe what Lebby is saying: that it won’t happen again, namely because Lebby, considered a head coaching candidate someday soon, cannot professionally afford a career-afflicting moment such as this again and because his bosses at Oklahoma are angry with him.
Believe what Lebby is telling you, too: Between Saturday night and Monday afternoon, Lebby changed the picture on his Instagram profile to that of himself, his two children and Briles posing on the field at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Briles is wearing an Oklahoma shirt in the photo.
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Keep listening: A reasonable interpretation of Lebby’s disposition and posture during his Saturday night comments might be one of frustration. Or, considering Lebby’s history selling “CAB” (Coach Art Briles) T-shirts to support Briles after his firing, more likely one of open defiance.
Those are entirely reasonable ways to receive the moment, although they may be a more generous interpretation extended to a man undeserving of it. What appears to be the real truth: Lebby fundamentally does not understand what the problem was, because he does not believe Briles was worthy of dismissal at Baylor or the career ignominy that has followed him.
Whether that belief is genuine or a willful denial of fact is almost beside the point, although no one should be naive enough to attribute to this the proverb of stupidity mistaken as malice, because that’s the true horror facing this sport: Either is just as harmful, and both are in heavy supply.
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How else can we rationalize the persistence of Art Briles? Saturday marked the latest in an incomprehensible parade of public associations, appearances and even attempts at employment by one of the most disgraced names in the history of college football.
Not even a year after his firing, Briles sought a new coaching job in the Canadian Football League in 2017 before public backlash caused the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to bail on the idea. Briles settled on a job coaching pro football in Italy in 2018. Most jarring is that Briles successfully returned home to his roots, securing a high school head coaching job in Mount Vernon, Tex., for two seasons in 2019 and 2020.
But he wants back in college football, the site of his disgrace, and persists in trying. In 2019, Briles interviewed for the offensive coordinator job at Southern Mississippi under former head coach Jay Hopson. When university leadership swarmed to reject even the idea of Briles as a candidate, let alone his hiring, Hopson mirrored Briles’s son-in-law and leaped to his defense.
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Undeterred, Briles actually cleared the interview process in 2022 at Grambling, where Coach Hue Jackson also defended the move publicly before pressure from the university, including Grambling legend Doug Williams, forced a Briles “resignation.” Jackson was among the first to embrace Briles after his firing, inviting him to attend practices when Jackson was coach of the Cleveland Browns.
Lebby is not alone here; Briles’s son, Kendal, also a Baylor assistant during the period of sexual assaults, has moved through a variety of high-profile assistant coaching jobs and is the offensive coordinator for TCU. And along the way, Dad has stopped by practice.
So while a grossly unforced error for Oklahoma, Saturday night’s gaffe was by no means unique. More importantly, neither is what happened at Baylor. Take the unfolding story at Michigan State, where Coach Mel Tucker has been suspended without pay after he was accused of sexual harassment by sexual assault prevention activist Brenda Tracy. (Tucker said in a statement Monday that his relationship with Tracy was “entirely mutual.”)
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If we’re to expect any good faith in the words that come from those in power, we should believe only what we hear the first time, not after the correction and not after the outcry. Lebby hasn’t changed his mind — he has changed his position in an act of professional self-preservation. So what happens if he’s the head coach somewhere in the near future, with one fewer person above him who can prevent that grandfather from showing back up?
It really doesn’t matter whether Lebby or anyone else caping for Briles is doing so in defiance of the truth or genuinely can’t believe it. Both are terrifying, and either way it’s publicly manufactured aggrievement that shifts victimhood from sexual assault survivors to men in power. Either way, you should listen when they tell you.
ATM fees
This is not a hot seat notice. It’s also not not one, either.
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When is a 40-22 overall record (and 23-18 in the SEC, which is well above .500!) totally — nay, wildly — unacceptable for a head coach? When the bill of sale for that effort exceeds $100 million and the vendor in question is a consortium of oil billionaires famously equal parts ambitious and snakebit.
Texas A&M heaved a 10-year, $75 million contract at Jimbo Fisher in 2017, ostensibly because the former Florida State coach boasted two things the Aggies wanted most: a national championship (in 2013) and a résumé bullet as a Nick Saban assistant (Fisher was offensive coordinator on Saban’s 2003 national championship team at LSU), which remains to this day the SEC’s platinum path to relevance, at least in the eyes of boosters.
The most eye-catching detail of the contract then (and now!) wasn’t the dollar amount, which pushed Fisher north of $7 million annually to keep company with multi-championship winners Saban and Dabo Swinney, but the deal’s total guarantee, meaning that if Fisher were let go at any point, A&M would still owe him the unpaid remainder.
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The depths of A&M’s desperation for national title credibility allowed Fisher to cash in twice: After an initial 26-10 run through three seasons, capped by a 9-1 campaign in 2020, the school extended Fisher in 2021, stretching his guaranteed deal to $94.9 million through 2031.
Back to that 40-22 record: Subtract those first three years, and Fisher is 14-12 since. Saturday’s 48-33 loss at Miami was another reminder that this is in no way a program on par with actual national title contenders. Suddenly that 2020 season increasingly reads as an outlier, not the proof of concept A&M brass interpreted, and they’re underwater on a mortgage for magic championship beans.
The richness of this situation is that the Aggies are never terrible or excellent under Fisher, just maddening: A 2021 upset of then-No. 1 Alabama, then a first for a former Saban assistant against the old boss, could have served as an arrival, but it came the same year A&M lost to unranked Mississippi State and LSU teams en route to a Gator Bowl invite.
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Last year was must-watch Aggies football for everyone who isn’t an Aggie: A&M suffered a gut-punching home loss to Appalachian State in which the offense, still managed by Fisher, mustered 180 total yards.
Naturally, it immediately beat No. 13 Miami and No. 10 Arkansas in consecutive weeks.
Then it lost six straight, including a 13-10 loss to a head coach-less Auburn.
And two weeks later it beat No. 5 LSU. You really can’t help but rubberneck at the Aggies’ escapades.
If Fisher is fired by the Aggies this season, he’ll be owed $76 million in full. Attach that erratic football product to a price tag seeped in hubris, and it’s a crystalline representation of the only college football program with a billionaire’s reach and a pauper’s grasp.
Ten percent
This Saturday’s matchup between Purdue (1-1) and Syracuse (2-0) will mark a very rare occurrence: Two Black head coaches of Power Five programs will meet as out-of-conference opponents.
After the resignation of Stanford’s David Shaw last season, Syracuse’s Dino Babers trails only Penn State’s James Franklin as the dean of Black Football Bowl Subdivision head coaches, while the Boilermakers’ Ryan Walters was hired this offseason after successful defensive coordinator stints at Missouri and Illinois.
By my count, two Black head coaches have met in a Power Five nonconference game only three times in the College Football Playoff era: when Babers and Syracuse faced Michael Locksley and Maryland in 2019, and twice last season when Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman coached against Shaw and Babers.
After the offseason hires of Walters, Deion Sanders at Colorado and Kenni Burns at Kent State, the number of Black FBS head coaches is at 14 (pending Tucker’s future at Michigan State), or about 10.5 percent of the FBS, where the number of Black players consistently exceeds 50 percent.
A college football hipster’s game of the week
Western Kentucky at Ohio State, 4 p.m., Fox
It’s a brutally thin schedule this week, with no ranked-vs.-ranked matchups and a dearth of interesting conference games, hence both ESPN and Fox trotting their pregame shows to the Deion Sanders circus in Boulder, where Colorado will host Colorado State.
In a sea of lopsided games, consider watching an Ohio State defense that has been unchallenged to this point (10 total points allowed against Indiana and Youngstown State of the Football Championship Subdivision) face Western Kentucky, one of the best offenses in college football. The Hilltoppers averaged 36.4 points per game last season under returning quarterback Austin Reed.
This is by no means an upset pick, but the Hilltoppers provide the best test available for an Ohio State team with a ton of questions (and lingering defensive anxieties entering next week’s game at Notre Dame).
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