Hamilton Tiger-Cats owner Bob Young (centre) says the team made a serious mistake hiring Art Briles as an assistant coach.MIKE CASSESE/Reuters
After a day of watching his football team torn to pieces by angry fans, sponsors and media across North America, Hamilton Tiger-Cats' owner Bob Young said it was his fault that coach Art Briles had been hired despite his role in a sexual-assault scandal at Baylor University in Texas.
Young acknowledged a mistake had been made that was "completely my responsibility," saying it had embarrassed the team, its fans and the Canadian Football League. The Ticats announced early on Monday they had hired the 61-year-old Briles, only to be convinced by league commissioner Randy Ambrosie that it was a decision that flew in the face of the CFL's continuing efforts to show a social conscience.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail late Tuesday, Young said he was embarrassed by what had happened, noting it was the result of a flawed decision-making process within the organization. The football side of the operation – from team president and chief executive Scott Mitchell to vice-president of football operations Kent Austin to newly appointed head coach June Jones – looked at Briles as a coaching asset. Young had to be brought up to speed on Briles's undoing at Baylor, where he was fired for overseeing a program in which players were involved in a string of alleged sexual assaults and rapes.
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"I was aware of it but I did not know who Art Briles was," Young explained. "Someone mentioned to me that he was with Baylor and Baylor had a scandal, and while he wasn't involved in the scandal he was held responsible for it. So I googled it up. It looked pretty ugly to me. We had a conversation about it [and] as an organization we chose to move forward anyway. That was my responsibility and my error. I should have exercised the authority I had to say no; this is not consistent with the brand that the Tiger-Cats hold to, the values we hold to – and I did not exercise that authority and all of this is a result of my sloppiness."
Asked if a change in the team's decision-making process meant he would become more involved in football operations, something he has been loath to do, Young replied: "No, that would not be a win for anyone. Where I have to be more involved is in the formal approval of decisions that could affect our brand. Instead of going 'that might affect our brand,' we have to be much more disciplined in our review process. We have to study it much more objectively."
Young added that the Briles story generated a landslide of attention and also cost the team money. According to a source, Briles had agreed to a contract and received a signing bonus.
"I'm not going to speak to the details other than to say that this episode of me parking my brain and not doing what was right to our values of our community is costing us a huge amount of money," Young said, "and a trivial part of that is travel expenses and other money we might have actually spent on recruiting Arthur."
Briles lost his job at Baylor University last year after Pepper Hamilton, a law firm commissioned by the university to examine the school's compliance with Title IX, a law that prohibits discrimination against women in federally funded schools, found "specific failings within both the football program and Athletics Department leadership, including a failure to identify and respond to a pattern of sexual violence by a football player, to take action in response to reports of a sexual assault by multiple football players, and to take action in response to a report of dating violence," according to a finding of facts published by the school's board of regents.
In a Wall Street Journal report from October, 2016, school regents at Baylor said Briles, who coached at the university from 2008 to 2015, mishandled information about alleged assaults perpetrated by his football players, while school staff fostered a culture that put winning football games above everything else, including the well-being of women who claimed they had been assaulted.
A source said the Ticats' decision to hire Briles was made, in large part, by Austin and Jones, who both knew Briles and valued his coaching record at Baylor. Mitchell was on board with signing Briles, who had something to offer the Ticats even though he had never worked a down in the CFL.
Briles had coached former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Robert Griffin III, the second overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft. Dubbed RG3, Griffin played for the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Browns before being released last season. Griffin is on the Ticats' negotiation list, along with other free-agent quarterbacks Johnny Manziel and Colin Kaepernick. It was reasoned that with Briles as an offensive coach, one of these three quarterbacks might be inclined to come to Hamilton.
Young let his football people run with the decision and Mitchell contacted the CFL office late last Friday to say he was thinking of hiring Briles. Early Monday, when the Ticats announced that Briles would be joining the team as an assistant coach, Mitchell did an interview with the football blog 3 Down Nation and said: "As an organization, we have to decide whether we're going to give people a second chance and judge them for their own character, morality and ethics. I can tell you there wasn't one single person that we spoke to who knows Art Briles that didn't think he deserved an opportunity to work in football."
That helped set off a maelstrom of shock and anger. Ambrosie spoke repeatedly with Mitchell to convince him that bringing in Briles went against its partnership with the Ending Violence Association of Canada. The CFL has also highlighted its "Diversity Is Strength" and "Bring It In" campaigns to promote the inclusion of all genders, races and religions in football.
"The Ticats are one of the oldest professional sports franchises in the world. … And the branding I think at this point is being jeopardized by what I believe to be a very poor decision," said Hamilton Councillor Sam Merulla, a season's ticket holder.
"I've never seen an issue go so bad so quickly," said Bob Bratina, a former mayor and long-time Ticats radio broadcaster who is now the Liberal MP for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek. "This is a serious disruption to the fans' connection to the character of the team. That's where it hurts."
Hamilton had planned to unveil Briles at a news conference Tuesday inside their media centre at their stadium. Instead, Jones was brought out for a casual scrum in a corner of the field, to briefly speak after his first practice as the team's head coach – to a throng of reporters that had by the afternoon swelled in size.
"Art and I have been friends for 40 years. Thinking it all through today, this is really an emotional thing for me, very personal. I've had a history of helping people, and that's what I'm about," said Jones, whose voice was cracking. "I have my own opinion on the whole thing, but it's meaningless right now because we've made the decision as a club. That's the way it is right now."
When asked if the decision to hire Briles was made in part to attract other quarterbacks to Hamilton, Jones said "everything was considered, yes."
From there, Jones insisted on football-only questions.
Several Ticats players, having come off a bye week, said they didn't know much about Briles or the hiring and reversal of the past day.
"I don't have a lot of social media, I can't tell you much. I've never met Art and it's above my head. I have learned of him now, but I didn't know anything about him yesterday," said receiver Luke Tasker. "I don't know Art at all. I've heard from people that he's a good guy but there were probably some mistakes made there. It's not part of my job to know or to care about it, and I'm happy that it's not."
Among the diehard fans who were shocked by the turn of events was David Cicci, a member of the well-recognized kilt-wearing fan group, the Box J Boys.
"The most concerning thing to me, is Mitchell defended the move expressing 'everyone deserves a second chance.' Well, given the severity of the Baylor situation, Mr. Mitchell, there is no room for second chances here in Tiger town," said Cicci, in an e-mail to The Globe. "It was just a plain bad decision and thank goodness pressure from the fans, team sponsors and the league made them come to their senses on the issue."
Mitchell said Ambroise deserves credit for the decision, in the end, to rescind the offer to Briles.
"Honestly, it wasn't a matter of him convincing us. It was a matter of all of us admitting that this was a mistake and that it was a very complicated issue that wasn't as simple as maybe we had … it just isn't a simple issue," Mitchell said. "The more we talked to Randy, the more it became clear that the hiring would be too complicated, and too toxic."