I don’t know who all was involved in the investigation, but I’d like to see some kind of formal inquiry into the handling of the situation before making a hire. We really need to be determining whether Sayler is someone who should be making this hire, even if it means waiting until the summer and essentially taking a punt on next season. It’s more important to do this right than to do it fast.
Grumpy and Cool Papa said it better than I did. When a professor has an intimate relationship with a student they are taking advantage of power over the student. Same with a coach over a player. If you read what Red Sea said about another employee being given assignments he felt he had earned and then finding out she was dating the boss that is an abuse of power. Did the girl that Coach Hendrix was professing love for get more playing time than she would have otherwise, as an example. The adult in authority is expected to be above such issues and behavior, it goes with a teaching or coaching position.
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Needless to say I am very disappointed in the way the university, athletic department, and ultimately Sayler handled this. Say what you want about DS but in his tenure we’ve never had a whiff of scandal, but this certainly stains things quite a bit.
And that, Dick, is precisely why there are rules against it that - if violated - are grounds for termination with cause. The rules protect both the coach and the player if adhered to.
We did have the football vs fraternity fight on his watch and the suspensions/dismissals - but that wasn’t attributed to anything the AD did.
It’s on the CBS sports website now. A complete managerial clusterf$ck. It should have been a simple decision, fire Hendrix with cause. I can’t begin to understand it. The publicity would most likely have been contained locally and would have shown that Miami took the issue seriously and did the right thing. Instead, the university was obsessed with trying to maintain some illusory public image as some kind of magical kingdom.
Now, Hendrix is most likely going to drop a seven figure lawsuit for a “university source” leaking the details of her exit and scuttling any hope for another coaching job. The negative publicity has become national rather than local as a cover up will always amplify the underlying issue.
Sayler should lose his job, and if the President’s office was aware of this, Crawford should lose his too.
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As far as a lawsuit, it is going to depend upon where the leak came from. And how the information on the phone was obtained. There are other factors involved as well in litigation of this sort. But I don’t want to bore with the details!
As to the remainder of what you said Hawk99, I agree this situation was poorly handled. I would be curious to know who above Saylor was involved in the handling, and did they get the advice of legal.
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Truly a mishandle in every respect! I’m going to guess it might be because many on staff seemed to “like” Hendrix.
Call it the Simon the Likeable factor from the old Get Smart TV series. Even though Simon was an agent of CHAOS, all it took was the twinkle in his eyes to fully disarm the “good guys.”
A dangerous factor in running an organization!
There are two things I find interesting about this story I doubt that we will ever find out about.
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Who was the person who tipped off Sayler? Was it a member of the team who knew or suspected something was going on? If not, it most likely had to be someone close to the team. Why did they speak up now as opposed to a month ago?
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Who was the leaker? What I find interesting about the leak is that it appears to be from someone who is very savvy and knowledgeable about media. This was not leaked to The Miami Student, The Journal News or even local Cincy or Dayton media. Those would be obvious avenues to someone who is not savvy or knows the sports media landscape. The leak went to The Athletic that I don’t think has ever done a story about Miami WBB. The story was also written by The Athletic’s senior writer for the WNBA and women’s college basketball (Chantel Jennings) and another senior writer with a national sports background with the Chicago Tribune and Sports Illustrated. That person also had to have been very closely attached to the investigation to have access to the text messages in order to provide them to The Athletic.
It is also interesting that local media has largely ignored the story. Is this because Miami has a PR fixer who had good contacts with local media but not so much with national sports outlets? Is it because Miami ad money is in play with local media?
A lot of unanswered questions we likely will never see answers to.
It’s what DevilGrad said. The Enquirer and Journal-News both used to have dedicated Miami beat writers, but not anymore. Now a freelancer covers Miami for both papers - usually. Miami sports is not something that leads to massive website clicks and pageviews these days, so Miami gets ignored.
I understand that local media does not have beat reporters covering Miami.
I understand that Miami sports does not translate into massive clicks and page views.
However, a salacious story involving a coach and player should translate into clicks and page views. That is even truer with a local college.
It doesn’t take much to take a few quotes from The Athletic article and put together a story. Plenty of national sites, blogs and others have done the same thing with this story.
If they don’t have the resources to do that story they are really hurting.
Or those in charge of content at local outlets have determined that nobody cares about Miami in the slightest no matter what it is.
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This is not really a sports desk story at this stage so whether there is a beat reporter to cover Miami athletics is irrelevant. This is a salacious story involving a potential coverup at a major local state university. It is a story for the news desk with all the elements needed to grab the reader’s attention. The metro editors have to be aware of it. It is not a healthy situation for either the public or the university of this kind of situation is allowed to go unnoticed by the media.
A friend of mine was in Lafayette, Indiana this weekend for work. His hotel delivered the Lafayette paper. The Sunday morning sports section in Lafayette, Indiana was entirely wire stories about national sports. There wasn’t a single story about Purdue athletics—not even about Purdue football players taken in the NFL draft.
Local media is a joke these days apart from the isolated bright spots.
I don’t agree with this. The reason so many places are writing about this is because “coach in relationship with player” is an interesting topic people will want to read about, even when they aren’t familiar with the coach or school. Whether Miami fired her or let her resign wouldn’t have made a difference there (except that maybe if she was fired, no one within Miami would have felt compelled to leak the details, if that’s what happened)
I think it’s disappointing how it was handled and she should have just been fired, but I don’t think the average person learning about this is thinking “wow, Miami made a mistake here”, they are just focused on the scandal. I think some of the concerns about how negative this will be for the perception of Miami are overblown. But that doesn’t mean the decision makers at Miami should just be let off the hook either.
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I wish we had a new coach who had some recruits lined up so we could start talking about that.
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FWIW, nothing yet on ESPN Women’s College Basketball website.
Looking at the roster we currently have posted online, it looks like we only have four women’s basketball players at Miami. Six undergrads are listed but Maddi Cluse and Ivy Wolf are still shown - and we know Ivy’s gone and Maddi is in the portal.
The landscape is wide open for someone good to reload fast. Let’s hope this happens soon. My truck doesn’t have a rear view mirror so I can only look one direction.
Also, for some reason, it says “Mom’s Attic” on the top.
This will be forgotten in a week.