South Carolina offensive coordinator Kendal Briles speaks with athletics director Jeremiah Donati during a press conference in Columbia on Friday, December 12, 2025.
Special To The State
South Carolina Athletic Director Jeremiah Donati had already been through this same vetting process. That made it much easier for the Gamecocks to introduce Kendal Briles on Friday as USC’s new offensive coordinator.
Four years ago, when Donati was TCU’s athletic director and the Horned Frogs were coming off a national championship appearance, head coach Sonny Dykes was looking at bringing in offensive coordinator Kendal Briles.
That was problematic. For starters, Briles was at Baylor for almost a decade working under his father, Art Briles. TCU and Baylor are heated rivals and, well, imagine South Carolina hiring Dabo Swinney’s son to lead the offense. There would be some pushback.
“To bring it over someone from Baylor to TCU,” Donati said Friday, following Briles’ introductory press conference, “that’s also another vetting thing, just as we would here if it was Clemson to South Carolina.”
And then, of course, was the more serious matter. The TCU hire was made a few years after the “Briles” name was stained following a sexual assault scandal that rocked the Baylor athletic department, costing Art Briles and many others their jobs and reputations. Art Briles sued Baylor in a wrongful termination suit, and the two parties settled for $15 million in 2018.
In 2016, a Title IX lawsuit claimed the football program fostered a hunting ground for sexual predators. Another lawsuit brought about similar allegations, saying that 52 women were raped by Baylor football players.
While Kendal Briles was never formally charged with any wrongdoing, there were allegations around him.
“Three players from the Houston area,” Houston Chronicle reporter Jenny Dial Creech wrote in 2018, “who now play in other programs, say that when Kendal recruited them he made mention of female students at the university being very available to football players.”
Further, in one Title IX lawsuit filed against Baylor, Briles was accused of sending a text message to Dallas-area recruit: “Do you like white women? Because we have a lot of them at BAYLOR and they LOVE football players.”
Donati said he looked into all of that before he hired Briles.
“Everybody that we’ve talked to in the process about Kendal Briles’ family, heard nothing but tremendous things,” Donati said. “It’s not lost on any of us what happened to Baylor years ago, but we have plenty of confidence that there was absolutely nothing there that we need to be concerned about. So we went through that whole process at TCU and there were no red flags.”
Neither Beamer nor Briles was asked about the subject during their public press conference remarks, but Beamer told the Post and Courier on Wednesday that he was “completely” satisfied with USC’s vetting of Briles.
Asked if it mattered to him whether the accusations against Briles were true, Donati said “of course it matters.”
“But you talk to plenty of people,” he added. “We had nothing but positive responses there (from) people who worked at Baylor, works at Baylor now (and they) said wonderful things about Kendal.”
It should be noted that following the scandal that forced his father out of Baylor’s head coaching chair, the school kept Kendal Briles employed. He served as the Bears’ offensive coordinator in 2016.
Since then, he’s worked at a number of other institutions: FAU (2017), Houston (2018), Florida State (2019), Arkansas (2020-22), TCU (2023-25) and now South Carolina.
