While we are all marveling in the great starts of Florida and Colorado State and Indiana State, one unbeaten has been forgotten.
True, this team hasn’t beaten anyone. No seriously, they haven’t beaten anyone. They haven’t even beaten a Nicholls State or an Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne. And true, it won’t beat anyone until at least January 11, if it ever does beat anyone. But for the beleaguered Baylor men’s basketball program, it can at least brag about one thing: its undefeated mark.But that is all they have to brag about.
Two years removed from the nastiest scandal in college history that extradited Dave Bliss to Bismarck and Patrick Dennehy to his grave, Baylor prepares for what will be the longest two-month season any team has ever had to play.
At 0-0 and without interconference games for the entire year, Baylor has had the last month to practice and lift weights while other teams gained valuable game experience. Yet there is no doubt that the players would much rather be out there on the court.
But thanks to the most dumbfoundingly bizarre decision the NCAA has ever made, this is not possible. In addition to taking away scholarships and banning the team from postseason play, the NCAA forbade Baylor from playing any interconference games in the 2005-2006 season. None. Not one.
And because of the atrocities that the scum Dave Bliss committed more than two years ago, Baylor’s hardworking players and coaching staff must be punished.
It is one thing to take away scholarships from a team. It is another to punish the players by taking away the postseason. But it is beyond repair to take away half the schedule.
The NCAA has laid down a punishment as harsh, if not harsher, as the one it gave to Southern Methodist’s football team in the late 1980s. The death penalty is not cruel and unusual, but beating someone half to death is. And taking away half of Baylor’s schedule is such. Yet the NCAA doled out the sentence like it were Adolph Hitler dividing up Poland.
Not like we’d expect the NCAA to do anything to help Baylor. But I can tell you this much: if Kentucky or Indiana had done the same thing, they would be playing in November. And they’d be playing a lot.
But the NCAA does not care. They assassinated this program further; they’ve done more than enough. Have they no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have they left no sense of decency?
So because of Dave Bliss and the evil hand of Miles Brand, Baylor’s fourteen young men will not take the court until January 11, 2006, when they jump right into the heart of the Big XII schedule.
Short scholarships and players, Baylor would already be hard struck to win just one Big XII game this year. Now take away the 12 non-conference games in which the team would have progressed, and you got yourself the recipe for an 0-16 year.
“I don’t think I’ll have to work long on a pre-game pep talk to get them fired up for that first game,” said head coach Scott Drew. But you still need something in the way of talent. Baylor lacks that and lacks the games to discover and develop it.
So while the number of undefeated teams dwindles, one team is guaranteed to remain so for at least another month: the Baylor Bears. It may not be their dream idea of an undefeated record, but it still is the undefeated record that you see in the standings.
And while Baylor probably will lose that mark on January 11 when it travels to Texas Tech for its season opener, it won’t be without a fight.
They may not have had anything go their way for the past two and a half years, but the Bears still have a heart. That is the one thing that the NCAA did not take away.
I would not be surprised to see this team go 0-16, but I would be surprised to see them lay an egg even once. They don’t need a pep talk.
With thirty-some odd days to go, Baylor might as well want to be sedated. But there is no Joey Ramone on campus. Baylor will keep practicing and preparing for opening night.
Miles Brand may have sent his cronies to perform operations on Baylor, dehumanizing it in the process, but he has not killed it.
It is cruel and unusual, but it has been done.
And Baylor will rise again, never forgetting the last two and a half years and the undefeated record.
