TCU football is not wrong for hiring Art Briles’ former strength coach at Baylor
Kaz Kazadi is regarded as one of the best strength and conditioning coaches in college athletics, but he has the distinction that makes a lot of TCU fans and followers nervous, disappointed, and irate.
Coach Kaz was a member of Art Briles’ staff at Baylor University from 2008-16.
Coach Kaz is now the new TCU football strength and conditioning coach.
“Outstanding hire. Kaz has proven himself to be at the very top in training student athletes,” Briles said via text. “Kaz’s unique style of motivation and love is unparalleled.”
Said former Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw, “Kaz is a program-changing sports performance coach. He is gifted in building relationships and motivating student athletes to reach their peak performance. Kaz played a huge role in developing Baylor’s championship teams in 2013 and 2014.”
TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati said Kaz has been vetted, and cleared. As much as people don’t want to hear this, that has to be enough.
Typically when members of that Baylor staff have landed jobs elsewhere, there are pockets of fans who are upset that their school hired a coach associated with that regime.
During his introductory press conference on Tuesday morning at Amon G. Carter Stadium, the first name coach Sonny Dykes mentioned was Kazadi.
Along with Phil Bennett, Kendal Briles and other assistants, Coach Kaz was a part of a program that became the face of the worst time at Baylor.
Other than Art Briles, every one of his assistant coaches landed jobs at other programs.
Part of Kaz’s responsibilities and duties at BU under Briles was discipline; basically, part of Kaz’s job was to be there early, or late, and make the players who were in trouble do extra conditioning, such as running stadium steps, etc.
After Briles was fired by Baylor in May 2016, Kazadi was a part of the staff that remained on under interim coach Jim Grobe.
When Matt Rhule took over at Baylor the following season, Kazadi left shortly thereafter to take a job with the Dallas Cowboys before moving on to Arkansas State.
He joined SMU in 2018.
To land the jobs at Arkansas State and SMU, he had to go through a vetting process, similar to the one that Bennett had to go through when he became the defensive coordinator at Arizona State.
“I did talk to [Kazadi]. I felt comfortable with the work SMU did on him, but we also did our own,” Donati said. “That was direct outreach to Baylor and get a full understanding.
“It was a different time. They didn’t have any policies. They didn’t have any education.”
As someone who followed that Baylor story extensively, hiring any of these guys comes with a stigma, fair or not.
The incident Kazadi was most often linked to was an alleged episode in February 2012, when a member of the Baylor volleyball team was allegedly gang raped by several members of the Baylor football team.
According to a lawsuit that was settled before it went to court, Kazadi interviewed the football players in question and nothing of note happened to the players.
In the suit the victim claimed, “The assistant football coach [Kazadi] reportedly spoke to other Baylor football coaches who engaged in victim-blaming.”
Briles reportedly did not find out about the incident until the following year. When he asked Kazadi if anything else needed to be done, Kazadi said no.
In interviews and email exchanges with members of the Baylor staff, including the volleyball coaches and a player, this alleged incident included all of the terrible cliches that so often are associated with these tragic tales.
Something happened. Unless you were present it’s hard to know to what extent.
Baylor volleyball players, and coaches, all said to a man that Briles’ and his staff behaved appropriately when they found out about the alleged incident.
The fatal flaw in the process was that Baylor University back then was ill-equipped to deal with such charges. All of the adults in charge looked at each other and thought someone else was going to handle it.
All of the adults in charge looked at the other and thought they’d handle it.
No one on that football staff should have been a part of that interview process, and when such claims are made today the athletic department is divorced from such proceedings.
Coach Kazadi was never charged, and he was vetted by the NCAA, SMU, and now TCU.
As much as some pockets of angry fans don’t want to hear this, that has to be enough.
This story was originally published November 30, 2021 at 4:17 PM.
