Jeff Lebby's hire is a failure, for Mississippi State and college football
In a sport that's desperate to press onward into an uncertain future, coaches still elude consequences as much as they ever have.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
Content warning: this article discusses a sexual assault scandal throughout.
College football is a sport that has undergone a radical transformation over the last few decades, like many others. Nowadays, it’s a data-driven, terminally-online enterprise, a thing driven by hashtags, analytics, and cryptic tweets, in a way that has demanded its more archaic sides to catch up to the modern day quite quickly. And, inevitably, the pushback against college football’s march into the future has defined the vast, sport-sweeping headlines that define the modern era.
Sometimes, the traditionalists have a point. In a practical sense, it’s obviously not ideal that contending for titles in 2024 requires wrangling a roundabout NIL system to dole out millions of dollars to recruits—the fact that players are being paid is one of the only parts about this that does make sense. And the arms race in program amenities, while positive in some respects, has only widened the parity gap in the sport between haves and have-nots. Ultimately, being up-to-date means having resources, and the faster college football moves forward, the more certain programs’ coffers afford them an advantage in making the necessary changes to stay on top.
I’m not in love with where college football is going, in short. I don’t think anybody is, at least not completely; the sport obviously needs something to rein it in, and as weak as the NCAA has been, lawmakers crippling its ability to do that while declining to do it themselves hasn’t helped a bit. Unlike in some fields, there’s more to fearing football’s future than simple reactionism—worries about where we’re headed are founded in watching things change in a way that’s damaging to pretty much everybody who has a stake in the matter.
Amid this understandable, widespread concern about leaving behind the college football we once knew, it’s rather jarring that one of the few things that hasn’t changed is the sport’s outdated, embarrassing response to sexual assault scandals. For the most part, those implicated in such horrific allegations are rarely held out of the sport entirely, and whatever “punishment” they do receive is typically a function of coaching ability and time since the scandal, rather than anything they’ve done to deserve a second chance1. Memories of how well you did at a top job (especially if you can get another one in the meantime) are lasting; memories of perpetrating or covering up some of the most unspeakably vile actions imaginable, to college football programs, are not.
Art Briles, former head coach at Baylor prior to his implication in the program’s 2015 sexual assault scandal, has proven a rare exception to this rule, at least for now. Nearly a decade removed from his firing, no FBS team has given him serious consideration as a head coach, or even to our knowledge as an assistant. He’s spent that time drifting through Canadian and Italian football, coaching at Mount Vernon High School in Texas, and joining the Grambling State staff for four days in 2022 before massive backlash led to his near-immediate resignation. For once, the sport has drawn an admirably hard line: this man does not belong on a college football sideline.
And yet, at the end of Oklahoma’s 28-11 win over SMU early in 2023, there he was.
It soon emerged that Briles had appeared there because of Jeff Lebby: his son-in-law, running backs coach at Baylor in 2015, and a vocal defender of the disgraced former HC. Lebby, as you would expect, defended Briles’ presence by pointing to their family connection—”that’s the grandfather of my two kids”—and eluded any ramifications for his actions despite AD Joe Castiglione and HC Brent Venables voicing their discomfort. Not only did he stick around as Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator for the remainder of the season, he parlayed his unit’s success into his first head coaching role, taking the Mississippi State job at the end of the year.
So, what are we doing here, exactly? While Briles was more central to the Baylor scandal than anybody else, Lebby was involved in a similar way; he was directly told of allegations against players in his program, including directly by one of their victims, and took no action2. Yet while Briles have been effectively blackballed from the sport, Lebby was back to an equivalent position as a P5 assistant within half a decade and is now at a job in the best conference in college football. In the inexact art of determining whether a coach is still hirable, multiple programs have determined that his less prominent (though no less repugnant) role in the scandal, combined with his coaching skill and the time that’s elapsed since, make him an acceptable choice.
Let’s be clear—Lebby, assuming he doesn’t run a disastrously messy program, will very likely succeed at Mississippi State. He’s one of the best offensive coaches in the sport right now, and he’s taking over an SEC program that Dan Mullen showed can be a major contender. This move isn’t embarrassing for MSU in the way, for example, hiring Hugh Freeze was for Auburn; under the assumption that they saw nothing wrong with Lebby on a moral level, he was the obvious pick.
But, obviously, employing a man who helped cover up sexual assault, regardless of how long ago it was or how good a football coach he is, is an abhorrent decision. It’s jarring how completely the sport has been willing to move on, not only from his actions and his vocal defense of Briles a decade ago, but also from his continued willingness to maintain ties with one of football’s few outcasts in the present. If this sport insists on further change into a husk of its former self, we can only hope that at some point, it leads to meaningful consequences for those as disgusting and deserving of disgrace as Jeff Lebby.
The Last Five Years
It’s understandable that Mississippi State fired Zach Arnett after less than a single season. In many ways, he was little more than a glorified interim coach, thrust into the transitional role earlier than usual due to Mike Leach’s untimely passing between the end of the 2022 regular season and MSU’s bowl game. Of course, it’s not necessarily a negative reflection on Arnett that Mississippi State tumbled to 5-7 and won a single SEC game in his lone full season—after all, he took over in extremely difficult circumstances (and did somehow pull off a win over Arizona, which finished #11 in the AP Poll). But you can’t blame the Bulldogs for moving on and conducting a full coaching search; the problem is entirely with who they picked at the end of it.
The offense might be decent next season. While undeniably putrid at times in 2023—scoring ten or fewer points in half of their conference games, and finishing 107th in PPG overall—it’ll have longtime Baylor starter Blake Shapen to lead the way this year, and transfers have bolstered nearly every position on the unit. We know Lebby is capable of turning around an offense quickly, but it might not matter if the defense is as bad as it figures to be. The Bulldogs return a dismal 27% of production on that side of the ball, second-worst in D1, and the transfer additions are more lacking on this front, not nearly enough to patch all the holes in a unit that kept MSU from being even worse last year. Mississippi State stepped back in its first seasons under both Leach and Arnett, and Lebby will probably add to that trend if he can’t find a way to keep the Bulldogs from surrendering cripplingly high totals.
The Next Five Years
The vast majority of coverage on this hire makes no mention, explicitly or otherwise, of the glaringly obvious problem with it. Lebby hasn’t just received unjustified exoneration for his role in the 2015 scandal; his slate has been completely wiped clean, with most of the media treating him like any other successful coordinator.
And…I kind of get it, although I still think it’s reprehensible to dance around the issue like this. It is exhausting trying to be the voice of reason in a sport that desperately sweeps its flaws under the rug, to keep interrupting the simple, fun on-field discussions in order to point out such heavy matters. It’s unacceptable, yet understandable, that at some point carrying that burden becomes too much.
In lieu of a positive note to end this piece on, I’ll leave you with an appraisal of this move from one of the rare voices in media which is an exception to this rule. While I’ve had my issues with Split Zone Duo’s Alex Kirshner, his thoughts on Lebby’s hire were as direct and incisive as you can hope to find in a sport that seems determined to forget the mistakes of its past without ever atoning for them:
If Lebby learned a single useful lesson from his father-in-law Art Briles’ management of Baylor, he has never articulated it in public. Hiring him is a small-time move by a program that thinks it can turn an association with shitty, shameless behavior into a market inefficiency.
Really, “a second chance” shouldn’t be a multimillion dollar coaching job in one of the biggest sports in the nation, but apparently it’s already asking a lot for universities just to think about their hire’s morals whatsoever.
It’s worth noting that the university never denied Lebby’s knowledge, which is particularly damning.