Don’t Poke The Sleeping Bear: Baylor Coach Gets Feisty With Reporter, Pulls QB From Interview After Loss
Um, what’s this guy’s problem? I suppose getting a 55-28 beat down care of Texas A&M is the most likely cause of Baylor head football coach Art Briles’ piss poor attitude, but it doesn’t give him the right to take out his anger on a reporter trying to do his job.
Lets set the scene… Although Baylor got whooped in Saturday’s contest, the Bears quarterback Robert Griffin III balled out, throwing for a school record 430 yards and three touchdowns. So what did Aggies coach Mike Sherman do once the game ended? The classy thing of course, which was to find Griffin and congratulate the young man on such an impressive performance (despite the loss).
Somewhere in the depths of Kyle Field (looks like near the locker room), the media gathered around Griffin to ask some post game questions. As you’ll see in the video, a reporter asks Griffin what the opposing coach said to him after the game. That’s when the peanut gallery chimes in. And by peanut gallery, I mean Coach Briles.
The Baylor coach steps in, saying to the reporter, “where are you from? Are you from A&M?” The reporter replies, “Coach, I work for the Bryan-College Station Eagle,” and that was all it took for Briles to shut it down on the spot. Briles says that Griffin doesn’t “need to answer that” and sends the QB on his merry way into the locker room. Granted, you can hear the Baylor media relations person in the video say “last question” before the “evil A&M” reporter snuck in his sinister question, but it’s not the coach’s place to pull a player from an interview like that.
Unless there is a significant piece of information we don’t know about, Mr. Briles owes that reporter a personal apology for being unnecessarily rude. As a reporter, I can tell you that when a coach speaks to you in that tone, in front of your peers, it is a humiliating experience. I’ll be waiting to see how Briles attempts to justify his behavior, but I won’t hold my breath for an apology.
