My wild speculation is that Hollis is going to be the one coming out of this the worst.
My slightly more than two cents of elaboration on this point...
Background into the ESPN story. There was a story a few years back about how at UF and FSU, football and basketball players were prosecuted at a far lower rate than when charges were brought against members of the student body as a whole. ESPN wanted to investigate whether this was a UF/FSU problem, or a major college sports problem (I think we all know it's a pretty across the board thing, but you need proof). MSU was one of the schools they picked as a comparison point, as another large state school. That is where the brunt of this legwork came from. The result of that was a 2015 story that concluded the MSU athletes faced the same prosecution rate as non-athletes, but that their findings were not totally conclusive because of redacted reports. I believe the only new story in the new ESPN report were the 2 assaults last year, involving 4 players, all 4 were suspended immediately, and then were kicked off the team permanently, as soon as charges were filed, before their first court appearance.
So to the charges in the ESPN story
-5 incidents (3 assault, 2 sexual assualt) involving football players where no charges were filed, no evidence Dantonio was alerted
-1 incident (sexual assault) in 2007 involving football players, where nothing was ever reported to anyone, and was only discovered in 2014 when her parents read her diary, at which point police investigated
-2 2016 incidents (sexual assault) involving 4 football players, mentioned above, all suspended immediately, then kicked out, plus the firing of his top recruiter for not reporting the incident to Dantonio immediately, and trying to handle it himself
-Appling/Payne 2010 (Sexual assault) incident which was known, and investigated by both the DAs office, and the MSU Title IX, which led to nothing
-two Travis Walton incidents (one assault, one sexual assault), which occurred after he was done playing, while he was a student assistant. One was pled down to littering due to conflicting witness reports. The second of which, according to ESPN he was fired as soon as the accusation happened, even though that allegation went nowhere. Oddly ESPN claims MSU fired him, Walton claims he wasn't in any official capacity and had always planned on just leaving when he graduated.
First, ESPN doesn't really state their thesis. Is it that violence by MSU athletes is a problem? Is it that MSU athletics is covering up? Is it that MSU is coercing law enforcement in their handling?
For the first, we'd need a wider investigation, to get some sort of a comparison. I agree any violence is too much.
Is it that MSU athletics is covering it up? Of the 11 incidents mentioned above, the police were involved immediately every time, except the time where the incident wasn't discovered until reading her diary 7 years later, at which point it was investigated.
So I guess it has to be some sort of MSU/law enforcement coercion. It seems odd considering their 2015 story says athletes and non-athletes were prosecuted at the same rate, and the only new incidents involved all 4 athletes being arrested, charged and kicked off the team, with the additional firing of a coach for mis-handling it. Not sure how that has made things worse. I think it has more to do with ESPN trying to give legs to a Nassar story, by giving it new legs. That said, I agree MSU has a problem with handling these. You don't have to take my word for it. The Department of Education and an independent Pepper Hamilton investigation that were both focused on the school as a whole have said as much. So if they are mis-handling cases at large, it stands to reason they are mis-handling these too.
But that brings me back to Hollis. I don't think the Nassar thing was on him nearly enough for an immediate resignation. I don't even think Simon's resignation was forced by MSU's bumbling of Nassar so much has badly they continued to bumble it while it was in the nation's eye. I'm not sure that level of MSU-wide PR, and control over the Board of Trustees was coming down on the Athletic Director. I think Hollis was 100% tied to this story. And again, the facts as I've laid them out above, aren't enough to lose a job over. 11 incidents over the course of a decade, where the police were involved every time. So there has to be something more there. I would say the red flag to me is the lack of prosecution on all but the 2016 cases (9 of 11). Again, none of the cases as of the 2015 ESPN report were prosecuted, and they said it was fine then, but that's where something smells to me. They can't find any proof that MD knew, but they don't say one way or the other about the AD. If he also didn't know, I see no reason to immediately resign over this. So that's me speculating.
My questions going forward has to do with the 5 unreported football player incidents, and the Walton stuff.
(1) Did Dantonio or Hollis know about those 5 incidents? Why did the victim decline to bring charges in those cases. Even if charges weren't brought, was there enough that MSU should have still punished them from the football side?
(2) With the Walton incidents, why were the charges reduced? What were those conflicting witness reports? And what did Izzo think. Maybe the attorneys are telling him to say absolutely nothing, but a statement of "I had a player on my team for four years, a captain, who was helping out after using up his eligibility. I asked him, I trusted him, and the lack of charges brought backed up his story. When he was accused a second time, I removed him from the team. I regret trusting him the first time, and if I could go back I wish I hadn't, but based on our relationship, and the actions of the police, I felt comfortable at the time. When it happened again, he had broken that trust." Based on the facts, that seems like a perfectly reasonable statement to me. But he hasn't made it. Is it because they've told him to say absolutely nothing, or is it because it isn't true? My gut feeling based on the silence, and Hollis' actions, is that he knew and did something well below board.
From a purely athletics standpoint, those are the two major questions I want answered. From an MSU-wide standpoint, there are major, major issues. Both in terms of leadership and handling of sexual assault. While the public probably doesn't care about MSU aside from how they do on a football field/basketball court, those things are WAAAAAAY down the list for me. MSU can appease the interwebz by having Dantonio and Izzo follow Simon and Hollis out the door, but if they think firing a couple of coaches fixes anything, they are wrong, and that's what scares me. That MSU's PR is so bad right now, that the decisions moving forward are going to have more to do with fixing the image than fixing the problem, and we'll be right back here in 7 years. To go with that, there are multiple facets to running a university, and the movement from within to purely promote a female faculty member to fix the sexual assault problem is very shortsighted. Hire someone with a background there to do that job. Give her that title, and give her power. But the role of the President needs to be much broader than that, and with the spectrum of investigations coming MSU's way, a professor is nearly the last person who should be running those things.
