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Friday, June 8, 2018

The Scapegoat, by Lane Alpert

For many college football fans in recent years, Baylor has come to mean "scandal" and Coach Art Briles is a rape enabler.  Unfortunately, this narrative has been promoted and promulgated not only by Baylor's rivals but by the national press, especially ESPN.  Even more unfortunately, the narrative is based on exaggerations and falsehoods.  Baylor alumnus Lane Alpert had enough of the smearing of his alma mater.  In a novelized account of the Baylor scandal, The Scapegoat: How a Network, a Conference Rival and a Commissioner Crucified a Coach to Accomplish Their Own Selfish Agendas, he attempts to set the record straight.

Alpert is an Art Briles defender, no doubt about it.  That colors his presentation.  But if you look at the whole picture, as Alpert does, it becomes clear that the truth about what Briles did or didn't do or knew or didn't know is not at issue.  Brile's downfall was the result of a ESPN's attempt to make UT relevant again (and the Longhorn Network profitable), a writer's animosity toward religious institutions, and a Big 12 commissioner who wanted the big schools in the conference to dominate.  Briles became a convenient target. 

None of the parties are named in this "novel."  Alpert writes about "Baptist University," "State University," "the Network," "the Reporter," etc.  Through these thinly veiled identities he tells the real story of the motivations and schemes that killed Briles's career.  The only truly fictional part of the story is the end, where Briles is hired by a small school in the south.  The athletic director convinces the president to ignore the press and the social media mob and make the hire.

In his announcement of the hiring of "the Coach" the AD states: "We have been unable to find any situation where the Coach ever had direct contact with a victim, where he ever discouraged someone from reporting the information or going to the police.  In fact, we have discovered just the opposite.  The Coach is on record for encouraging victims to press charges with the authorities.  We have also found no situation where the Coach ever played an athlete once the player was found responsible for committing a sexual assault."  This is taken from a letter from Baylor to Briles, which has been made widely public.

This is the frustration of many Baylor fans: if Briles is as bad as he has been presented by the press, if he covered up and condoned rape, if he truly created an environment in which Baylor women were in danger from predators, shouldn't he have been summarily fired?  If his offenses are so bad, why let him go with a multi-million dollar parting gift?  And if there was no cause, why let him go at all? 

The toothpaste can't go back in the tube.  Scapegoat is a good effort to set the story straight, but no one will listen.  Briles has been declared to be the devil by the court of social media.  He brought Baylor to a higher lever of greatness, and Baylor turned their institutional back on him.  No college will touch him now.  Meanwhile, Stoops retires with accolades, in spite of very public problems at OU.  After years at the helm at Florida State, where rape was epidemic in the football program, Fisher is getting paid millions to coach at A&M.  Where was ESPN when he was hired?  This whole thing is frustrating.

Scapegoat will only make frustrated Baylor fans more frustrated and will make Baylor haters hate Baylor more.  But it's a story that needed to be told.  Too bad Briles himself can't tell all. 

(By the way, while I did enjoy the story, keep in mind it's self-published by an amateur author.  It's riddled with typos and grammatical goofs.  He could have used a good editor, but please look past that to the story and the message.)

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