The NCAA is keeping an eye on the ongoing saga at Baylor.
According to ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” the NCAA’s enforcement staff has already interviewed “former Baylor administrators, Title IX investigators and some of the women who alleged football players sexually assaulted them” as the organization weighs whether the sexual assault scandal at the school has resulted in any rules violations.
The ESPN report says the NCAA is “casting a wide net” when determining if violations took place:
Sources said NCAA investigators haven’t yet focused on specific allegations of wrongdoing, instead casting a wide net to determine if any NCAA rules might have been violated. The NCAA is also asking whether Baylor players might have been provided improper recruiting inducements and other illegal benefits while playing for the Bears.
An NCAA spokesman declined to comment when reached by ESPN on Friday. A Baylor spokesman also declined comment; the NCAA discourages its member schools from commenting on ongoing investigations.
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Baylor has been back in the headlines in recent days after the filing of two lawsuits. One, filed by a woman who says she was raped by two former Baylor players, says the woman is aware of “at least 52 acts of rape by not less than 31 different football players” between 2011 and 2014. The other suit, filed Thursday by Baylor in response to ex-football director of operations Colin Shillinglaw’s lawsuit against the school, provides documents allegedly showing that former Bears head coach Art Briles was aware of off-field transgressions from his players and involved himself in their discipline — or lack thereof.
Baylor hired law firm Pepper Hamilton to investigate its handling of a bevy of sexual assault accusations at the school. Baylor regents met with the NCAA in May after the school released the summary findings from that investigation — which led to the firing of Briles, resignation of athletic director Ian McCaw and removal of president Ken Starr, so the NCAA has been keeping its eye on the situation for some time. However, information from this latest lawsuit could bring the possibility of impermissible benefits into play.
The newest suit includes quite a few text messages allegedly sent from Briles trying to keep various legal issues from his players out of the public eye. Some texts also alluded to setting players up with a local attorney.
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told ESPN that NCAA issues could come from the text messages:
Bowlsby told ESPN on Friday that the NCAA could be looking into some of the issues raised in the text messages as they pertain to extra benefits.
“I doubt very much that most students have anybody available to steer them to legal counsel,” he said. Bowlsby noted that he would need to know the specific circumstances; referring a student-athlete to a lawyer might not qualify as an extra benefit, but transporting him to an attorney’s office and negotiating a payment might.
“It’s the kind of thing that will raise the antenna of NCAA investigators, that those are exactly the kind of things that are athletic-related that the NCAA’s investigation will certainly look into.”
Asked whether helping a student circumvent the school’s student conduct code also could be considered, Bowlsby added: “Yeah, I think that would likely constitute an extra benefit, as well. … Anything that a student-athlete received that other students wouldn’t be privy to, there could certainly be a case made to consider it an extra benefit.”
Though the Big 12 is watching the situation closely (Bowlsby said there is a “shared frustration” among league members), Bowlsby said the conference won’t assess penalties of its own and will wait to see how the NCAA handles the ordeal — if it does at all.
The NCAA, many would argue, overstepped its usual bounds for punishment when it imposed heavy sanctions on Penn State in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Many of those sanctions were rolled back, so focusing on things like impermissible benefits and improprieties in recruiting could end up being the NCAA’s focus.
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Sam Cooper is a writer for the Yahoo Sports blogs. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
