Daily Bears Reports 8⁄14: Soccer Wins 3-0; US Court of Appeals Ruling on Title IX; Football

Baylor Football

Baylor’s offense was sluggish and their secondary impressed in football’s 1st scimmage. BearsExtra has this story along with Campus Insider videos.

Freshman walk-on Dwyer Bucey led the Bears running game with 80 yards on 21 carries and Hasty contributed 49 yards on eight carries. Both running back Shock Linwood and safety Orion Stewart didn’t play because they went through graduation ceremonies Saturday morning.

Leading Baylor’s defense was safety Davion Hall and nickelback Eric Ogor with six tackles apiece. Hall, who converted from receiver to safety in the spring, also made an interception and a fumble recovery.

Coach Grobe is not worried about Baylor’s depth.

“Randy Clements hasn’t worried much about them, and I typically don’t worry if the position coach doesn’t,” Grobe said. “Sometimes you talk about not having a lot of depth and the real issue is not having enough talent. In this case the guys we’re going to count on are good football players. We have to be fortunate and stay healthy.”

The Wake Forrest NewsObserver has an article on Coach Grobe.

Back in his Wake days, even as Grobe reportedly turned aside inquiries from the likes of Arkansas and Nebraska, he admitted daydreaming about getting a chance to direct a resource-rich program that could reload annually with top talent. The defense-oriented coach was acutely aware, too, that in an era of spread offenses, “Fans want 50 points a game, fans want wide open.”

Now he’s been handed the reins of a program that won 50 games and two Big 12 titles over the past five seasons, that led the FBS in 2015 with 48.1 points and 616.2 yards per outing. In their last game under Briles, the gifted Bears thrashed North Carolina 49-38 in the Russell Athletic Bowl, setting a record for any bowl by rushing for 645 yards despite the absence of their top two quarterbacks and No. 1 running back.

Keeping intact the staff that produced those results is not only reassuring for players, but apt to keep Baylor competitive despite scant depth. Easing the way, the Bears, ranked No. 21 in the preseason coaches poll, return a top quarterback in senior Seth Russell. They also play four of their first six games at $226 million McLane Stadium, which opened three years ago.

Grobe will do some subtle tinkering. He emphasized winning the turnover battle at Wake; last year Baylor committed as many turnovers as it forced. Still, the 2006 AP National Coach of the Year has no illusions about how his instant rehab job will be judged.

“This has been the sentiment from a lot of areas: that the record doesn’t matter this year, that it’s more about Grobe coming in and trying to help stabilize the program, get all the players headed in the right direction, and the wins don’t really matter,” says the 40-year coach. “But you know better than that. The wins matter. The wins matter. If I wasn’t of the mindset that we’re going to try to win every game that we play, I need to go back to Georgia.”

Baylor Soccer

Baylor Soccer ends the exhibition portion of preseason camp with a 3-0 victory over Houston Baptist. WacoTrib’s BearsExtra has the story. Newswest9 has more:

“With these exhibitions, I’m not as concerned with the score as what we get out of these games. I think we learned a lot from Thursday night, playing the Dash and we brought a lot of that into this game. We have a lot of respect for Misty [Jones] and her team with what they do. That is why we like to play them. They bring a challenge to us at every position. They are a tough team and they battle hard. That’s what we needed to see tonight.” – Head Coach Paul Jobson

Baylor Olympian

Trayvon Bromell will compete in the 100-meter semifinals today in Rio at 7:00 p.m. CT. Re-cap of Bromell’s 1st round race:

Bromell had the slowest reaction time in his heat at .165 seconds, but made up for that disadvantage quickly to move to the front of the field through 30 meters. With 15 meters to go, Bromell slowed up and coasted to the second-place finish to automatically advance to the semifinals.

Out of the 70 athletes in the opening heats, Bromell’s time tied for eighth fastest overall with a time of 10.13.

BearsExtra brings us more on Trayvon Bromell.

Title IX

Bill Whitaker, the Opinion Editor of the Tribune-Herald raises the question of just how much the slow and vacillating evolution of Title IX contributed to the toppling of Baylor’s leadership.

As if colleges and universities didn’t already have enough headaches between the sexual-assault allegations involving their students and stupefying complexities of Title IX gender-violence protocol, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has made everything even more bewildering. Its July 29 ruling highlights the tribulations now experienced by schools such as Baylor University.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling only confirms what many of us now realize: Title IX protocol involving campus sexual assaults is every bit a work in progress and has been for several years. If you don’t grasp this, you can’t begin to understand anything else that’s happened at Baylor lately.

This tortuous learning curve has been difficult for students, sports fans, college donors, coaches and campus administrators, leaving some casualties if not outright victims. The deployment of Title IX protocols also proves how academic institutions — however accomplished in the realms of science, history and philosophy — can be lousy excuses for courts of law.