The Bears won the 2021 National Championship, but nearly two decades earlier, the program was in disarray for reasons unrelated to the game. Murder.
Time passes, often leaving turmoil behind. That’s one way of describing Baylor men’s basketball. Still nationally competitive, the Bears are one of the early favorites to win the Big 12 this season, ranked currently #18 nationally, and with games coming up versus #12 BYU and #20 Texas. That’s today, but the story was different as the Bears prepared for the 2003-04 season.
Patrick Dennehy and Carlton Dotson, high-profile players, went missing. Dennehy’s pickup truck was eventually found with its license plates removed in a shopping mall parking lot in Virginia Beach, VA, over 1400 miles from campus. Investigators soon located Dotson, who was at his home in Maryland.
During the search of Dotson’s computer, investigators found a message that he had sent to a cousin, saying that he had shot and killed Dennehy during an argument while the two were firing guns in the Waco area. Dotson was charged with murder.
Meanwhile, unrelated issues were lurking in the Bears’ basketball program. Those issues were concerning enough to Dave Bliss, the Bears’ head basketball coach at the time, that he instructed his players to lie to investigators, telling them to portray Dennehy as a long-time drug dealer. Bliss, a well-regarded coach with 500+ college wins, thought that he, his staff, and BU could avoid further scrutiny if the spotlight shined on the murdered player. The ploy didn’t work. Bliss lost his job and the NCAA walloped Baylor.
The story of Baylor men’s basketball in 2003 was told in the Showtime documentary Disgraced (2017). It’s a story we never want repeated in sports.
