Baylor coach's words shocking, shameful

Poring over the incredibly revealing transcripts of former Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss trying to convince players to paint dead teammate Patrick Dennehy as a drug dealer prompted an instantaneous gut reaction -- I wanted to run to the shower.

Turn the hot water on as hot as I could stand it, grab the scrubber and flay the skin raw.

That's how dirty it made me feel.

My second reaction was to immediately recheck a column I'd written about Bliss and the Baylor mess during the second week of July, before Dennehy was discovered with two bullet holes in his head.

Yep, there it was, in black and white in my own words: "Bliss is a good coach and a good man."

Can I take it back, please? Or at least change it to the past tense?

There is absolutely nothing good about the Bliss revealed in these transcripts, which are as gritty and stark as a grainy, black and white porno movie.

Instead, there is only the pathetic, rat-like scurrying of a man who knows that the trap is about to snap on his neck, a man who would stoop so low as to use a dead player as a scapegoat to try and save his own skin.

"Our whole thing right now," Bliss tells assistant coach Abar Rouse during a conversation Rouse taped July 30, "we can get out of it, OK? Reasonable doubt is there's nobody right now that can say we paid Patrick Dennehy."

Rouse: "I understand."

Bliss: "Because he's dead."

These are the cold, calculating words of the man who brought the troubled Dennehy to Baylor to play basketball in the first place; a 59-year-old man who accepted the basic precepts of college coaching: that he would take care of the young men put in his charge; that he would be a counselor, a friend, even a second father.

Oh, my, how Bliss failed. And oh, my, how many others like him are out there, fooling us, fooling young men and their parents?

If Bliss -- a coach who was trusted by his university, fans and the media -- was getting his hands this filthy, how many others that we believe in are doing the same things?

The tapes tell a story

You need to read the transcripts of the tapes to understand the depth of Bliss' complicity in this cover-up.

They show a coach who not only knew that some of his players used marijuana regularly but tried to use that knowledge to portray Dennehy as a drug dealer.

Why? To explain where Dennehy might have gotten the money to pay a $2,000 down payment on his SUV and $7,000 in tuition expenses; to provide a red herring for those investigating charges that Bliss and his staff provided Dennehy with the cash.

There are no indications on the tapes that any of the players actually saw, or knew of, Dennehy doing any drugs other than marijuana, but Bliss urged them to add a "kicker" to their story to investigators at Baylor by saying that Dennehy had once brought a plate of "exotic" drugs into the living room of his apartment and had flashed a roll of -- Bliss' words -- "50 or 60 hundred-dollar bills." The arrogance that permeates the tapes is nauseating.

At one point Bliss, who even at his resignation announcement acknowledged no personal wrongdoing in the Baylor situation, told Rouse, "I've got like 30 years [in coaching]. I've never talked to an NCAA guy, OK? I mean, that stands for something."

He's right. It stands for failure. Failure at SMU, where he left after an inquiry showed that he paid players; failure at New Mexico, where an NCAA investigation stalled when players declined to cooperate; and now the worst kind of failure at Baylor, where he leaves one dead player and another accused of his murder.

Excuse me, while I go try and scrub the slime off one more time.