Ian McCaw is no longer the athletic director at Baylor, meaning he has no qualms about going scorched earth on his former employer.
The Waco Tribune reports that McCaw, now the AD at Liberty, gave a sworn testimony in June to attorneys representing 10 alleged victims from Baylor's sexual assault scandal. In his deposition, McCaw spoke harshly of the schools regents, accusing them of racism and an "Enron cover-up scheme."
The eye-popping statement from McCaw is that Baylor had "an elaborate plan that essentially scapegoated black football players and the football program for being responsible for what was a decades-long, university-wide sexual assault scandal."
McCaw said he was "disgusted" by the racism, as well as the Board of Regents' Findings of Fact following the release of the Pepper Hamilton findings. In particular, he claims regent J. Cary Gray was tasked with writing it in such a way that it was "skewed to make the football program look bad and cover up the campus-wide failings."
However, McCaw did not stop at the Board of Regents. The equally damning accusation from the deposition is that former Baylor Police Chief Jim Doak, who retired in 2013, discouraged the reporting of sexual assaults and/or otherwise ignored rape accusations.
Baylor has since released a statement to the Tribune rebuking what it calls a mischaracterization of the facts of the case.
The plaintiffs' counsel have grossly mischaracterized facts to promote a misleading narrative in an effort to deflect attention away from the actual facts of the case pending before the court. Baylor has complied and will continue to comply with all court rules in this case. We will maintain our diligent efforts to keep discovery focused on this specific case while steadfastly protecting the privacy of our students and their records that are uninvolved in this matter. As permitted by the court's rules, Baylor will be filing a written response to the plaintiffs' motion.
McCaw was placed on probation in May 2016 and quickly resigned at the height of the scandal. University president Ken Starr was reassigned and eventually resigned. Coach Art Briles was suspended and later terminated.
It's not surprising that McCaw's deposition would make him sound like a saint by comparison. If McCaw is to be believed, Baylor was pushing a school-wide cover up and he wanted no part of it, going so far as to tell lawyers that he was instructed to lie about who knew what by public relations firm G.F. Bunting.
Still, the words from any higher ups now feel hollow. Baylor is in this position in the first place -- under a microscope from the NCAA and up to its eyeballs in lawsuits -- because it takes a lot of people to screw up this badly. But it only takes one person to blow a whistle.
