When a Baylor basketball player murdered another, the crime triggered a deluge of revelations about cars, cash, and other goodies provided to the school’s athletes by their coaches, under the table and massively in violation of NCAA rules. In an attempt to contain the damage, Baylor’s then-basketball coach Dave Bliss tried to frame the murdered player as a drug dealer whose sideline explained his lush lifestyle. When one of the assistant coaches took exception to the frame-up, Bliss threatened to fire him, which turned out to be a catastrophic misstep: The assistant began wearing a wire, and the resulting tapes sank not just Bliss but the entire basketball program.
The basketball scandal may get more attention with Showtime’s airing of Disgraced, a superb documentary that recounts the implosion of Baylor’s basketball program in damning detail.
At heart, the crisp and intense Disgraced is a true-crime documentary set against a backdrop of big-time college basketball. Better known as a bastion of Southern Baptist morality—dancing was banned on campus until 1996, and homosexuality was on its list of sexual misconduct as late as 2015—than as an athletic factory, Baylor decided in the late 1990s to end decades of basketball ineptitude. In 1999, ignoring hints that he’d flouted NCAA rules while coaching at nearby SMU, Baylor hired Bliss, who in a quarter of a century had amassed more than 450 wins in major-college basketball. Television critic Glenn Garvin describes what happened next.
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