I will assume most sports fans know who Art Briles is and why he was fired. If not, just Google “BAYLOR RAPE SCANDAL” and you’ll learn all you need to know.
Briles richly deserved to be removed as coach, and Ken Starr richly deserves to be ousted as school president. No argument at all there. No debate necessary.
But this got me thinking. Has ANY other coach with a record as good as Briles’ ever been fired JUST because of a scandal?
I can think of plenty of bad or mediocre coaches who were fired over scandals. But WINNING coaches, guys who were still winning conference titles and getting their team to bowl games?
Some may point to Joe Paterno, but Joe was NOT on top of the heap any more when the Sandusky report cost him his job. The Nittany Lions were no longer an elite team, and Joe was widely perceived as over the hill, and the administration had been hoping to get him to retire for years before the Sandusky scandal exploded.
In every case I think of, it turns out that scandal was just a handy excuse for firing a coach the administration already wanted to dump.
What other WINNING coaches have been fired due to scandal?
Gary Barnett at Colorado. Went 7-5 in his final season at Colorado before being fired for a “scandal” that wasn’t. It’s one of those things that will never go away, but there was no scandal. Not a single player or recruit was ever indicted for anything, let alone charged. There were many false and well documented accusations. The whack-a-doo DA (the same one who sent a police officer to Thailand to arrest an innocent man in the Jon-Benet Ramsey case) kept trying to pin something on the football team but her deputies kept telling her she had no case.
Barnett did call his female kicker (a publicity stunt he inherited from Rick Neuheisel) “terrible”, which she was. She could barely hit 50% of her extra point attempts in scrimmages with no rush.
Maybe North Carolina State Jimmy Valvano was caught up in a scandal over player Chris Washburn who scored 470 on his SATs (400 is the starting point). It had been seven years sine the Wolfpack won the NCAA and his record was only 18-12 the last season. But we tend to forget he was forced out because of his early death.
Bobby Knight wasn’t “winning” in the sense he was making it the Final Four every year, but he had been to the tournament 15 years in a row when he was fired.
I think you need to differentiate between “scandals” where the coach was caught red-handed being directly involved (Petrino, Knight, Woody Hayes, Larry Eustacy, etc.) and those that happened on his/her watch that they were not directly involved in, or at least have plausible deniability. There’s not much choice for a University if you’re caught on live TV punching a player or getting into a motorcycle wreck with a female employee that you hired on your bike.
Mike Leach was fired from Texas Tech at the end of the 2009 season allegedly for an incident involving a player: wide receiver Adam James, son of ESPN’s Craig James, had a concussion. Leach had James stay in an equipment/electrical shed near the field rather than staying with the team during practice; Leach later said that he figured the cool darkness of the shed would be beneficial. Texas Tech went on to fire Leach, despite his overall record of 84-43, 10 consecutive winning seasons, 5 bowl game victories, and being named Big 12 Coach of the Year for 2008.
Of course, speculation was rampant at the time that Leach was just unpopular with the Texas Tech higher-ups, and that they were looking for any excuse to fire Leach before they had to pay about $2.3 million that would be due to him if he were still employed at the end of 2009. There was even a book written about it.
End note: the funniest costume I saw the following Halloween was a guy wearing an Adam James jersey, with a little shed on his head.