Ian McCaw Believes Art Briles will be a Coaching Candidate Next Season
With Art Briles practically a distant memory in the college football world, his former boss doesn’t think that will be for long. Former Baylor AD Ian McCaw, who is now the AD at Liberty University, told CBS Sports he believes Briles will be “largely exonerated” and available to coach again at the FBS level after next season. He added that following the ongoing NCAA investigation at Baylor, “[Briles] will be in the 2019 hiring cycle.”
Briles was fired in May 2016 after an explosive sexual assault scandal broke on campus. McCaw resigned and joined Liberty later the same year, while Briles settled his contract but has not been close to coaching in America since. He was briefly signed by a CFL team before the backlash resulted in reneging on the deal, and is now coaching in Italy.
McCaw said, “I think he’s going to get largely exonerated. I think people right now are saying, ‘Holy cow, he’s implicated in [covering up] all these sexual assaults and so forth.’ I think the truth is going to be he comes out of the NCAA stuff clean… As more information comes out on the Baylor scandal, they’re going to find out [Briles] was scapegoated for a much larger campus wide problem and the failings were in the police department and across campus which is what I know to be the case.”
In October, Baylor was sent a formal notice of allegations by the NCAA, which pointed to an alleged lack of institutional control, which could subject the University to major sanctions.
McCaw was hired at Baylor in 2003 and he brought in Briles in 2008. Briles spent eight seasons with the Bears and took the program to new heights including winning two Big 12 titles.
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