Sports Pulse: Detroit Lions head coach is facing criticism for not disclosing 22-year-old sexual assault allegations. USA TODAY Sports
For someone who has spent his career carefully cultivating the image of a genius in coach’s clothing, Matt Patricia sure looked like a dope on Thursday.
Here he was, in front of the news media on a random day in mid-May, publicly discussing 22-year old allegations for the first time only because he seemed to foolishly expect that the kind of fame one acquires by becoming an NFL head coach would never result in a serious legal matter from his past being uncovered.
How is that possible in 2018? How dumb does this allegedly smart man think the rest of us are?
Over and over again during Patricia’s seven-minute news conference after the Detroit News uncovered a 1996 grand jury indictment for aggravated sexual assault, he made two things abundantly clear.
The first was that he believes he was falsely accused. The second is that he did not believe that accusation, which wasn’t just hearsay but an actual arrest and formal charge, was something he was duty bound to disclose with potential employers as he rose the ranks and became an inevitable head coaching candidate.
Barring new information or Patricia’s accuser coming forward, it’s impossible to discuss the merits of the case, which fell apart 10 months after the alleged incident when the accuser decided not to testify. Though a Texas grand jury deemed the evidence strong enough to move forward with the case, we don’t know what that means. Other details, including from the police report, have been lost over two decades.
For Patricia, a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute football player on spring break when the alleged incident took place, the case being dismissed was obviously an important moment in his journey to becoming the Detroit Lions head coach. Even if he was falsely accused, as he claimed, a trial would have put the entire future of a 21-year old in the hands of a jury. When the case was dismissed on Jan. 28, 1997, he was free to resume the rest of his life.
The allegation didn’t seem to impact Patricia’s coaching career, if anyone knew about it at all. From a fledgling career as an engineer to football at Amherst, then Syracuse, then the New England Patriots, Patricia said it was “never an issue” when interviewing for jobs. Patriots coach Bill Belichick released a statement indicating the team was "not aware of the matter which recently came to light" and praised Patricia for having "great integrity."
But once Patricia got on the fast track to becoming a head coach within the past couple years, the idea he would lack the self-awareness to anticipate his past resurfacing is simply not believable.
“I’ve interviewed for a lot of jobs and, again, interviewing for jobs in engineering right after this happened it was never an issue, it never came up as anything because it was dismissed and I was innocent,” Patricia said. “So it’s never been part of any process I’ve been involved with before.”
Of course, interviewing for a job as an engineer isn’t quite like interviewing to become the face of one of 32 NFL teams. If Patricia doesn’t understand the difference, he’s not intelligent enough to be an NFL head coach in the first place. Since that probably isn’t the case, it leaves us with the even greater sin of purposeful omission.
If the Lions never investigated Patricia’s background to an extent that would have revealed the grand jury indictment, which the Detroit News had little problem procuring, it’s bad. If they asked Patricia if there were any criminal or civil proceedings in his background and he did not disclose, that’s worse.
The more likely scenario is that Patricia told the truth within a narrow set of questions but did not go further than he had to, thus avoiding disclosure of a murky episode in his life that he has long since left behind.
While Patricia may feel he’s within his rights to do that, it’s the dumbest thing he could have done – especially in 2018 when the odds of something like that remaining a secret were less than zero.
Patricia took the indignant road on Thursday, chastising the news media for pursuing a story that “for the sole purpose of hurting my family, my friends and this organization with the intention of trying to damage my character and credibility.”
But if anything damaged Patricia’s character and credibility, it wasn’t a fuzzy accusation from 22 years ago. It was his strident belief that he’d never have to answer for it again.
