If it plays out as expected, one of the most contentious moments of this football season won't be argued in a board room by the College Football Playoff committee. The real action will come later, behind closed doors at universities where administrators with a head coaching position to fill will deliberate between the successes and sins of one potential savior.
Former Baylor coach Art Briles alluded to this inevitable drama while touring NFL training camps, where he confidently _ and surprisingly brazenly _ suggested in his down-home West Texas timbre that he will be hired as soon as others are fired.
"I will coach and I will coach in the 2017 season," Briles told reporters at the Houston Texans camp.
Come early December, around the time Briles will turn 61, the man who delivered a woe-be-gone program to national prominence in the guise of righteousness and an unmatched flair for offensive football, will likely assume center stage as an alluring but polarizing coaching candidate.
For he is also the man who was fired less than three months ago for overseeing a program found to have failed miserably in its reaction to a pattern of sexual assault allegations against players, while creating, as the Pepper Hamilton report states, "a cultural perception that football was above the rules."
Further complicating Briles as a potential candidate is the inadequacy of the 13-page Pepper Hamilton report, the lone documentation Baylor has made public that outlines the law firm's exhaustive investigation. It skewers Baylor's administration for failing to implement Title IX resources demanded by law, as well as the actions of the athletic department and football staff. But nowhere does the report name Briles or anybody else, leaving an open-ended answer to the question of just how complicit he is.
A report Wednesday by Waco television station KWTX painted Briles as more a scapegoat than a leader of a sinister plot to protect players and his program at all costs. That report went online shortly before ESPN aired a snippet of Briles in his first extensive interview since being fired admitting to making "mistakes," apologizing for making those mistakes and vowing to do better.
