I had a bad feeling that someone would sell themselves on Art Briles being a college coach again.

Back in August 2021, the NCAA ruled that while Briles was at Baylor, he didn’t violate their rules with his inaction. Of course, this is the NCAA. As in, the organization that refused to take part in Larry Nassar’s investigation after his decades of abuse at Michigan State, which ultimately led to a prison sentence of up to 175 years.

In other words, you can’t exactly fall back on the NCAA to be the judge, the jury or the executioner.

Well, unless you’re Grambling State. You see, it was Grambling State who was willing to fall back on that even though a lawsuit against Baylor claimed that 52 rapes occurred by at least 31 football players from 2011-14 while Briles was head coach there. Never mind the fact that the Pepper Hamilton findings showed that Baylor “hindered enforcement of rules and policies, and created a cultural perception that football was above the rules.”

But hey, let’s see what Grambling State athletic director Treyveon Scott thinks about his historic football program hiring Briles at its new offensive coordinator.

“I’m rooted in fact,” Scott told ESPN on Thursday. “I know a lot of things are said and done. We felt it [was appropriate] to give [Briles] a chance to really redeem himself after understanding where the facts lie.”

Rooted in fact, huh.

Here’s a fact. Go find the university’s release on Briles’ hiring. I’ll give you a minute.

Oh, you can’t find it? That’s because it doesn’t exist. What did exist was instead an “exclusive” sit-down with Briles from local TV station KTAL.

Why would a university let a local news station introduce its new assistant instead of doing that itself, you ask? A few reasons.

By the way, yes, that is Briles seated in the tweet. He looks like someone who spent 6 years on a deserted island. He basically did, and with good reason.

You see, the facts are that Hue Jackson (now the Grambling State head coach) tried to bring Briles to the Cleveland Browns as an offensive consultant in 2016 … until he left because of local and national backlash.

The facts are that Southern Miss announced it was interviewing Briles for their vacant offensive coordinator position in 2018 and head coach Jay Hopson banged the drum for Briles to “get a second chance” … until public backlash from donors, fans and administrators along with the pending NCAA investigation led to former interim athletic director Jeff Mitchell nixing the interview before Briles even stepped on campus.

The facts are that Hopson wanted to bypass these findings in order to add Briles to his staff:

We’ve reached the part of the argument where someone says “everyone deserves a second chance.”

Agreed. I’ve made countless mistakes. So have you. We can all agree that nobody is perfect.

But there’s a fine line between being given a second chance at forgiveness as a human being and being given a second chance to return to a coveted job. Briles, by virtue of getting any college coaching job, gets the latter.

And some might say, “well it’s not like he’s taking over a program again” or “hasn’t he suffered enough?”

To those people, I’d say let’s not talk about Briles “suffering” as someone who was in a position of power and admittedly did not follow proper protocol to report allegations of sexual violence over the course of several years.

Being a college football coach is a privilege. It’s something such a small percentage of the profession will get to do. You deserve to lose that privilege by abusing power in the way that Briles did.

Being a coach at an HBCU like Grambling State is a privilege. It’s something that a legend like Doug Williams takes great pride in.

Speaking of Williams, let’s check in on him as 1 of the 5 Grambling State players who earned a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame.

“I’m having a problem with it because other schools would not bite on it, then he’s coming to a Black school like we’ll take him in,” Williams told ESPN. “I have a problem with it, a major problem with it. I can’t support it that’s for sure. That hurt me to my core right there. … I know [late] coach [Eddie] Robinson is turning over right now.”

Williams hit on something key right there. “Other schools would not bite on it.”

Southern Miss tried, but the backlash following an official statement of just the interview squashed that (that’s also exactly why Grambling State didn’t bother with an official statement before or after the hire). At the professional ranks, the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats tried to hire Briles, but the backlash forced them to rescind the hire less than 12 hours later (the team’s owner called it “a major blunder”).

What those teams assumed was that as long as Briles wasn’t in a position of power, it would OK. As in, it would be fine as long as it was no longer up to him to go into living rooms and tell families that he’d put their child in the best position to succeed. They hoped they’d be able to maximize the best parts of Briles (his offensive acumen) while pretending that the worst parts of Briles (cultivating a culture of negligence of reporting sexual violence on a college campus) were all in the past.

It doesn’t work like that. It should never work like that.

To support that way of thinking is, at the very least, downplaying why abuse of power is such a serious offense. That’s why Briles had been banished from the sport he once dominated.

There’s a reason why Briles’ only 2 jobs in football since Baylor were in Florence, Italy coaching semi-pro football and in Mount Vernon, Tex. coaching high school football. In other words, a Texas high school was the only place in the western hemisphere that actually went through with hiring Briles in the last 6 years.

That is, until Grambling State bit.

And boy, what a tough pill that is to swallow.