Coach Briles,
As an avid college football fan, I have been very much aware of your prominence in the athletic world for some time now. You’ve won 50 games in the past five years at Baylor, nurtured a Heisman-winning quarterback and created a standard of offensive excellence that is now considered a benchmark for any team with dreams of winning a national championship. The magnitude and importance of your accomplishments at Baylor is undeniable, and as someone who understands and appreciates college football more than the average girl, I praise you for everything you’ve done on the field as a head coach.
Many people blame you for the recent scandals concerning the sexual assaults of female students at Baylor by members of your football team. Let me start by saying that, as a female college student, I am upset that your athletes have deemed it perfectly acceptable to treat women this way. But I do not believe that you are fully at fault. Do I blame you for the actions of Sam Ukwauchu, Tevin Elliot, Shawn Oakman and others that we may not even know about yet? No. Even as their head coach, you are human, and no human can control the conscious choices made by others. Do I blame you for the outright failure of Baylor officials and Waco police to take action in these situations? No, I do not. You do not have control over their choices any more than you have control over the choices of your players. I do not expect you to accept responsibility for the lapses in judgment of others. That would be blatantly unfair, and that is not why I am angry.
I am angry because you allowed your players to treat women violently. Even though I do not blame you for the choices they made, I can’t help but think that maybe if a few more serious conversations were had, a few less women would have found themselves in such a painful and traumatizing position. I am angry because while these women found it in themselves to speak up knowing full well that the world may completely turn against them, you chose to remain silent to prolong your own humiliation. I am angry because as an influential public figure, you chose to look the other way instead of taking action to stop campus rape, even though you have a daughter of your own, who just as easily could have been a victim when she was in college. And I am angry because through your failure to act, you have diminished, devalued and disgraced all women on the Baylor campus, across the country, and around the world. And for what? An extra seven points on the scoreboard? Another win to add to your record? Another five-star recruit committed to your program?
People are going to read this letter and say, “Well the writer is a TCU student, she’s always been biased against Baylor." But this is not about football, and this is not about rivalry. This is about ending the horrendous displays of blatant disrespect and disregard for the lives of women. If we want to put a stop to the rapidly growing sexual assault problem on college campuses, it’s on all of us to be the voice of those who are too frightened to speak for themselves. And that, Coach, is where you have fallen short. You allowed your players to believe that sexual violence is tolerable, so long as they continue to catch passes and make tackles and win games, and you allowed the women of Baylor to believe that their pain and their suffering is at best, irrelevant and unimportant. And I cannot look past that. The women of the world cannot look past that. As I said at the beginning, I have the utmost respect and appreciation for what you have done to change the world of college football. But I am speaking for the women of Baylor, for all college women in this country and for every woman around the world when I say that you have failed us. And I pray that you take your eyes off the National Championship trophy long enough to look around at the damage you have helped create. You’ve got a lot to answer for.
