College football has a serious culture problem and it has recently been highlighted at Baylor University.
The problem is the culture of sexual violence against women that's constantly gone unchecked, and Baylor is just the latest school to come under the national telescope. According to an investigation done by the school, the football program basically did nothing upon receiving several complaints of sexual assaults by football players and administrators repeatedly failed to adequately support assault victims. Things got so bad that the school's president was removed from his position (although they moved him down to chancellor) and beloved coach Art Briles, who turned the program into a legitimate title contender during his eight seasons there, was fired May 26.
Unfortunately this is not a unique situation. Earlier this year, the University of Tennessee Volunteers came under fire for similar problems within their athletics program; they were recently hit with a Title IX lawsuit in which six women accused the university of creating a student culture that enables sexual assaults by student athletes thanks to a legalistic process that's biased against assault victims (the process allows those accused the right to an attorney and to confront their accusers through cross-examination and an evidentiary hearing in front of an administrative judge). Upon further digging it was discovered some of the same things were going on with the Vols; administrators were turning blind eyes to complaints or distributing flawed justice.
The Florida State Seminoles in 2015 became the poster boys for violence against women when quarterback De'Andre Johnson and running back Dalvin Cook (pictured above) were each arrested for separate incidents where they allegedly punched women in the face (Johnson's was caught on video and therefore he was kicked off the team, while Cook beat charges in court). As if these incidents weren't troublesome enough, they occurred two years after former Noles quarterback Jameis Winston was accused of rape during his freshman year.
There's a saying that goes, "What's done in the dark will come to light," and it could not be more true than in this instance. This is the dark side of college football that continues to rear its ugly head; it's a culture where high-ranking persons continue to push the well-being and safety of young women to the wayside, because they care more about the big contracts from Under Armour and Nike and the big TV deals from DirecTV and Verizon that the football players get them. They care more about what goes on between the white lines on a Saturday afternoon than the mental trauma a young women who the star defensive end forced himself upon is going through.
Even scarier, these practices unfortunately justify the thinking that a lot of victims of sexual assault have: "Nothing will be done, so why come forward?" What kind of message are you sending to young women across college campuses by allowing this disgusting behavior to continue? How can you fix your lips to say you care about the safety of all students yet turn a blind eye to sexual violence against women in favor of a pigskin?
College campuses across the nation need to take a look at themselves internally because this is a crisis that's getting out of control with each passing day. The more you subject these women to a lack of apathy for these heinous crimes, the louder the message becomes to predators that what they do is alright and the more danger you'll put young women in.
