Twelve years after his coaching career collapsed in the wake of murder and scandal surrounding Baylor basketball, disgraced former coach Dave Bliss is back at the helm of another college program.
Bliss, 71, has been hired as men's basketball coach at Southwestern Christian University, a small Christian NAIA school in Bethany, Okla. He hasn't held a college coaching position since resigning from Baylor in 2003 after the scandalous fallout from the death of one of his players, who was murdered by a teammate.
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Bliss, who won 525 games during his 28-year coaching career at Oklahoma, Southern Methodist, New Mexico and Baylor, admitted to paying the tuition for former players Patrick Dennehy and Corey Herring. After Dennehy was murdered by a teammate in July 2003, Bliss led attempts to cover up his improprieties in his program and save face by convincing players to portray Dennehy as a drug dealer.
“Coach Bliss fits well within our mission and culture and embraces what a Christian-based education is all about," Southwestern president Reggies Wenyika said in a statement announcing the hire, via newsok.com.
Bliss is releasing a book later this month titled “Fall to Grace,” detailing the scandal and a quest to rediscover his faith in the years after. Southwestern athletic consultant Jim Poteet said in the release that school officials "believe in redemption" and thinks Bliss has been reformed.
Carlton Dotson, another former player under Bliss, is serving a 35-year sentence for Dennehy's murder. He unexpectedly pled guilty to killing Dennehy, with whom he was said to have been close friends, several days before the case went to trial in June 2005.
After the murder, one of Bliss' assistant coaches secretly taped Bliss having a conversation with two players, instructing them to sensationalize stories to police to make it seem that Dennehy was simply another African-American casualty of the drug trade. Bliss resigned from Baylor one day after the August 2003 memorial service for Dennehy.
A former assistant of Bobby Knight when he coached at Indiana, Bliss has worked in various roles around basketball since 2003, mostly in the high school ranks. He most recently served as coach, athletic director and dean of students at Allen Academy, a prep school in Bryan, Texas. The school was penalized for violating rules by allowing players to pay only a portion of the school’s $10,000 yearly tuition under his direction.