BAYLOR SHOULD LOOK INTO PRE-FIRING EVERYONE

The second staffer hired by Matt Rhule at Baylor has been fired, this time for sending inappropriate texts to a teenager. Associate Director of Football Operations Demarkco Butler did not send texts to someone considered a minor under Texas law, so he will not be facing criminal charges. He did, however, send them to someone young enough to merit dismissal, per KWTX in Waco.

The first Rhule-era staffer fired, Associate Strength Coach Brandon Washington, lost his job after his arrest in a prostitution sting in February.

This brings us to the extreme but also sort of sensible question: Should you just fire everyone you hire at Baylor pre-emptively, and make that part of the hiring process? Just to get everyone on the same page?

Theorize on your own about what, if anything in particular, makes Baylor a place where the adults running the organization often don’t know how to act. That’s all proven at this point, on multiple occasions, across multiple administrations and staffs. It is a thing, and continues to be a thing, so—why not make that clear by skipping a step, hiring people there, and then immediately firing them to get this out of the way before things go too wrong in any direction?

The staffers will know it can happen, and might behave accordingly. Baylor will show for once that it’s planning ahead when it comes to crisis management. It’s a private institution in the state of Texas, so we assume firing someone without paperwork or severance is actually too easy, legally speaking. The rehiring process will be swift: you already have all the paperwork lined up, and can skip the small talk and get-to-know-you work of the interview. The re-firing, when it’s inevitably necessary, will be easier after some practice.

Pre-firing is the wave for 2017, and we still aren’t really sure why Matt Rhule took this job. We still, after three months, have very few clues as to why Matt Rhule even thought about taking this job. Not taking a job in the first place is basically the ultimate pre-firing move. Note: We thought the exact same thing when Art Briles took the job, and yeah, now that we think about it pre-firing might have been the move in that case, too, and with a lot of people who’ve worked at Baylor over at least the past nine years or so, and likely more.