Five days after the body of one of his players was found dead, murdered by a teammate, Dave Bliss was hard at work at the cover-up to save his own skin.
David Bliss in 2003AP
Sitting with assistant coach Abar Rouse, the Baylor head coach mapped out his strategy to smear Patrick Dennehy, a Bears basketball player who had been shot and killed.
Dennehy’s body was found July 25, 2003. On July 30 of that year, Bliss, in chilling audio released as part of a new documentary about the murder and ensuing deception, can be heard instructing Rouse on how they would stain Dennehy’s character by suggesting he was a drug dealer. Doing so, he hoped, would throw investigators off the scent of the head coach, who had paid part of Dennehy’s tuition, violating an NCAA rule.
“There’s nobody right now that can say that we paid Pat Dennehy because he’s dead. OK?” Bliss is heard saying in a one-minute snippet of “Disgraced,” premiering Friday at 9 p.m. on Showtime. “So what we have to do is create the reasonable doubt. I got like 30 years, I’ve never talked to an NCAA investigator. OK? So, I mean, that stands for something. And the thing about it is, what the lawyers want to do is all they got to handle is $2,000 for the down payment, and then $7,000 on his tuition. And what we’ve got to create here is drugs.”
Selling drugs would explain how Dennehy had the extra money Bliss supplied him. But Bliss did not count on Rouse secretly recording his orders, which would lead to Bliss being fired from Baylor and banned 10 years from the NCAA. (Once that suspension was lifted in 2015, Southwestern Christian University in Oklahoma made Bliss its head coach.)
There has never been a shred of evidence Dennehy sold drugs. To this day, Bliss insists his account is true.