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Depositions reveal details of Beaty’s firing, allege crass comments by KU AD Jeff Long
MARCH 31, 2020 01:14 PM
Jeff Long planned to fire Kansas Jayhawks football coach David Beaty and replace him with Les Miles early in his tenure as athletic director but needed the money to do it, newly released court documents show.
Long and others planned the firing during the fall of 2018, including Long directing an employee to start raising funds from donors to finance the coaching switch. In the midst of that planning, questions about Beaty took a turn toward a personal nature when Chris Freet, a top Kansas Athletics, Inc. official, quizzed a colleague about Beaty’s sex life, including whether the coach was involved in an extramarital affair.
Ultimately, Long fired Beaty in November 2018, initially promising the coach $3 million due to him under his contract. The payment was later withheld after Kansas Athletics reclassified Beaty’s firing as for cause after an investigation found one of Beaty’s non-coaching staffers engaged in impermissible coaching activities under NCAA rules.
Those details and others emerged in two sworn depositions from February that were unsealed this week in a lawsuit that Beaty filed against Kansas Athletics, seeking the $3 million he says is owed to him. The documents present a portrait into how Beaty was fired and other details about the inner workings of Kansas Athletics, an organization keen on walling off public scrutiny of its private dealings.
Taken together, the depositions reveal:
• Allegations that Long made crass remarks of a sexual nature about an elderly female donor and a female school staffer;
• That Long was shown several examples by Beaty’s lawyer of similar potential infractions committed under Miles during games and practices last year, but that Long was not moved to investigate his current coach based on what he was shown;
• Long was set on hiring Miles early on in his tenure; under questioning, Long struggled to remember the names of other candidates he interviewed to replace Beaty;
• Kansas Athletics sought to begin documenting Miles’ eventual hiring, a process that involved recording the activities of top administrators before Beaty was terminated, for a ESPN+ series about KU football later named “Miles to Go.”
The depositions of Long and former Williams Education Fund director Matt Baty present so far the most public accounting of the behind-the-scenes machinations of Beaty’s firing, Miles’ hiring and the scrutiny of the process both by the press and by lawyers for Beaty.
Baty testified that he became aware of discussions to replace Beaty, with whom he acknowledges he is personally close to, as early as August 2018, shortly into Long’s tenure as athletics director.
Baty testified that the athletic department had a financial shortfall and needed to raise money to fire Beaty. What’s more, according to Baty, top athletic department administrators seemed to want the football team to lose that year to make it easier to justify firing Beaty.
“I think it would be — if the football program had success that year, it would make it — our jobs more difficult to fire David Beaty,” Baty said in sworn testimony.
Long in his deposition disputed that the athletic department lacked the funds to fire Beaty, pointing to an endowment fund that could be tapped to pay for the coach’s removal.
But Long’s testimony shows that Kansas Athletics developed scenarios to extend contract payments to Beaty over time for tax purposes.
Baty also testified that he heard Long make inappropriate and inflammatory sexual remarks about an elderly female donor to whom Long was prepared to make “a generous ask” financially. Baty also testified that Long made a comment about wanting a hotel room adjacent to where a female school staffer was staying, which Baty in context understood to be a sexual remark.
When asked for comment by The Star, a KU athletic department spokesperson pushed back at Baty’s testimony.
“As a general rule, the university does not comment on pending legal matters. However, in this instance, we feel compelled to note that Mr. Baty’s deposition is full of outright fabrications, lies and false attributions,” said Dan Beckler, KU associate athletic director for public relations. “As we have said all along, we are confident this matter will be appropriately resolved in court.”
Long’s testimony also appeared to inadvertently show a lack of interest for anyone besides Miles. When asked whom he had interviewed in person for the KU job, Long mentioned:
• Miles
• “Todd Graham or Grantham” (former Arizona State coach Todd Graham)
• “I’m struggling with his name. He was working for the LA Rams at the time (Rams senior offensive assistant Jedd Fisch)
• and “the defensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals, and I’m going to forget his name as well” (Lou Anarumo) Beaty’s lawyer Michael Lyons pressed Long repeatedly about video clips of game footage from the 2019 season, coached by Miles, showing Long numerous snippets of non-countable KU coaches interacting with players and coaches on the sideline.
The first was from KU’s third game against Boston College, which showed then-offensive analyst Josh Eargle flipping through Miles’ play sheet and pointing to something on it. An analyst, by NCAA rules, cannot “make or assist in making tactical decisions related to the sport during on-court or on-field practice or competition.”
When asked about the clip, Long said he was not worried about Miles’ and Eargle’s contact potentially being outside NCAA rules, because he didn’t have an understanding for what the communication was about.
“Doesn’t raise any concern,” Long said.
Lyons showed Long a later clip after KU had scored a touchdown against Boston College. Miles and special teams analyst Devin Ducote both held up their index fingers, appearing to show players that KU was electing to kick the extra point.
When Lyons argued that signaling by an analyst would be a violation during a game, Long disputed that.
“Devin could be signaling, ‘We’re No. 1,’” Long said. “We just scored a touchdown against Boston College. I don’t know. I don’t see any tactical thing. I see a finger in the air.”
Lyons later showed clips of then-KU analysts Brent Dearmon and Tony Coaxum potentially providing instruction, and also pointed out that TV cameras spotted KU football’s head of compliance, Jeff Smith, on the sideline during the Boston College game.
Long’s deposition also revealed a “confidential” internal email sent by Beckler, KU Athletics’ public relations director, speaking through what messaging would be to donors after a Kansas City Star report started an internal investigation that resulted in a Level III football violation added to KU’s notice of allegations in January. The Star initially reported finding five instances of KU football analysts — prohibited from giving on-field instruction by NCAA bylaw 11.7.3 — appearing to coach players during Miles’ tenure.
One hypothetical KU fan question posed in the email from Beckler: “Les Miles was shown in the videos of the KC Star story. Why didn’t he say something to the analysts? Shouldn’t have — shouldn’t he have known? Did his dementia affect this as well?”
Long explained the mention of Miles and dementia by his staffer was made “because on a Kansas State website during recruiting, they put that out there as a negative against our program. And then it was picked up by a number of people, and they started claiming that Coach Miles may have mental deficiencies.”
Long was asked by Lyons if he believed Miles had mental deficiencies. “No,” Long replied. When asked if it would be a problem if he did, Long said, “Plus I’m not a physician so I couldn’t make that determination, but I don’t believe he does.”
Long also revealed that after The Star ran its original story, he instructed compliance to look into the matter, saying, “it appeared from the news article there was a potential violation.”
KU took action, Long said, after it found evidence that Coaxum and Ducote had instructed players in potential violation of NCAA rules. Long said the two were suspended a week, then relegated to office duties for a week after that.
In addition, Long said, KU began making its non-countable coaches wear different-colored shirts in practice so they were easier to identify.
