The 2016 college football season began with a textbook case on how not to handle sexual assault at a major university. You may recall that Baylor was all but forced to fire head coach Art Briles after he turned a blind eye to numerous cases of sexual assault by his players. Well, the season ended with a case of how sexual assault on campus is supposed to be handled. On Tuesday, Minnesota fired second-year head coach Tracy Claeys in part for a horribly tone-deaf tweet supporting his players’ initial plans to sit out their bowl game in support of teammates who had been suspended for assaulting another student.
On December 15, Minnesota suspended 10 players for their roles in a sexual assault that occurred in an off-campus apartment on September 3. Four of them had been suspended earlier in the year pending a Minneapolis police investigation, but prosecutors declined to press charges. However, an investigation by university officials determined that the four players and five others had taken part in the assault and lied about it, and a tenth had denied being in the apartment despite witnesses saying he was there.
When the suspensions were announced, their teammates threatened to boycott the Holiday Bowl against Washington State unless they were reinstated. They did so with Claeys’ full support, per this tweet, which was still visible as of Tuesday night.
However, when the full details of the university investigation were released on December 16, support for the boycott collapsed, and the players announced they would play in the Holiday Bowl after all. The suspensions remained in effect; five of the affected players face expulsion from the university, four of them face one-year suspensions, while a tenth faces probation. All of them face appeals hearings later in January.
Minnesota went on to win the game, 17-14. However, it wasn’t enough to save Claeys’ job. On Tuesday afternoon, Mike Max of WCCO-TV in Minneapolis reported that Claeys had been fired. Athletic director Mark Coyle confirmed later on Tuesday that he had made “a very difficult decision” to fire Claeys. Watch coverage from Big Ten Network here.
Watch the press conference here.
Coyle said that when he arrived in Minneapolis six months earlier, he was committed to building a football program that would compete “athletically, academically, and socially” and “operates with integrity and class.” While he said that no one specific incident led to the firing, he did note that the events of the last few weeks “underscored some of the concerns” he’d had for some time.
Said concerns may have been underscored again when senior quarterback Mitch Leidner said he didn’t know “who would want to be part of this program” after Claeys’ ouster. Um, Mitch? You should be angry at the players who disgraced your teammates, your uniform, and your university–not Coyle.
In his statement announcing the firing, Coyle confirmed that Claeys had initially agreed with the decision to suspend the players. That makes his tweet of December 15 sound even more tone deaf, especially since he almost certainly saw the details of the investigation at some point. In a colossal understatement, Coyle said that the tweet “was not helpful.”
This move didn’t come without some prodding. Some 3,400 people signed a petition on MoveOn.org demanding that Claeys be fired for a failure of leadership. Additionally, several students had planned a rally on campus to call for Claeys’ ouster, which will go on as scheduled even though Claeys no longer has a job.
With this move, Minnesota will be forced to find its third coach in three seasons. Claeys took over midway through the 2015 season after Jerry Kill retired due to numerous health concerns. Claeys, who had been an assistant under Kill for 21 years at Saginaw Valley State, Emporia State, Southern Illinois, Northern Illinois, and Minnesota–the last 16 as Kill’s defensive coordinator–appeared to provide a strong and steady hand for the Gophers, and made a very good account of himself on the field in his first full season as coach. The Gophers went 9-4, their highest win total in more than a decade.
But none of that was enough, nor should it have even begun to be enough, to overcome one of the most tone-deaf tweets in recent memory. Apparently Claeys wasn’t paying attention when Briles got the gate at Baylor. It should have been a warning to the coaching fraternity–you cannot have your head in the sand on sexual assault and expect to keep your job, no matter how many wins you have. Claeys didn’t heed that warning–and now he’s out of a job.
(featured image courtesy Tim Nelson, Minnesota Public Radio)
