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of Friday night lights. Baylor was making a statement – McLaneean Stadium is for all of us, not just for Baylor Nation on college game day.

As I mentioned in a previous chapter, “Field of Dreams” brought into popular culture an abiding idea – if you build it, they will come. Unlike a Midwestern corn field turned into a ghostly baseball diamond summoning forth spirits from bygone days, McLaneean Stadium – which at Coach Briles’ insistence was renamed (prior to opening) to carry the McLean family name rather than the institutionalized, plain-vanilla “Baylor Stadium” – brought tens of thousands of fans and friends to the banks of the Brazos. Season ticket sales skyrocketed. Games were now sold out. At the aging Floyd Casey Stadium, albeit home to great memories over a half century, we worked hard to fill the seats. The occasional sell-out would occur when, say, the Longhorns came to Waco and eagerly bought up the thousands of unwanted tickets. That was then. Now, ESPN regularly brought “Game Day” to campus, and the prevailing colors were the beautiful gold of the Baylor Line, with shades of Baylor green sprinkled in. The optics were even better than at green-and-gold dominated Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

And so Sam Ukwuachu came. He had traveled way north from Houston, where he had done well enough academically in high school but whose strength and speed attracted the attention of gridiron programs across the country. He chose national powerhouse Boise State, but he was soon unhappy and homesick. His head football coach looked after him, thought he should be closer to home, called Coach Briles, and soon Sam was a Baylor Bear, although he never played football at Baylor. When Sam was charged with the unspeakably horrible act of rape, he protested his innocence and defended himself vigorously. Devastating testimony by a former girlfriend from Boise State – who contradicted Sam’s testimony of non-violence – likely sealed his fate. The McLennan County jury found him guilty, but then fashioned an oddly lenient sentence – probation. As I write, Sam continues to protest his innocence, and to seek redress in the courts. But the jury verdict stands, and Sam is thus a convicted felon.

Explosion II

Even in the best of programs horrible deeds are done. We are a fallen race. Even young men from “good families” succumb to temptation and allow themselves to enter the darkest of dark domains. The nationally-debated case of the Stanford swimmer, convicted of rape but given a lenient sentence, once again brought into sharp focus the problem of interpersonal violence on and around college campuses, and in particular, sexual assault. National statistics were frequently reported to the effect that 1 in 5 young women are sexually assaulted (or are otherwise victims of interpersonal violence) during their college years. Sam’s case provided the jumping off point for Texas Monthly’s provocative thesis that with all of its vaunted success, Coach Briles’ program was infected by a culture of violence against women.

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