Everyone knows it’s been a tumultuous time at Tennessee in recent weeks. While the old sexual assault allegations against Peyton Manning dating back to 1996 have dominated the news cycle in sports media and grabbing headlines, it’s only part of a much larger story. That story is the Title IX lawsuit that alleges a culture where the university displayed “deliberate indifference” to sexual assaults committed by Tennessee student athletes. This is also in the wake of a former football player being arrested in a child pornography investigation.
With an aura of scandal hovering over the university, its athletic department is taking an unprecedented step in having all of its coaches attend a press conference together this morning. Via the Knoxville News Sentinel:
Tennessee athletics will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. Tuesday that will feature all 16 of its head coaches, including football coach Butch Jones.
The news conference will be held at Ray and Lucy Hand Digital Studio. It will not be open to the public. No purpose or theme was noted in an athletic department news release.
The event comes two weeks after the University of Tennessee was sued in federal court over its handling of sexual assaults, especially those in which student athletes were involved.
Given everything that is happening at Tennessee and the extraordinary nature of the press conference, one would think this has to be about the Title IX lawsuit against the university and some kind of announcement relating to it. Coaches aren’t usually big fans of press conferences in the first place, so to get 16 of them to sit down for one together, at the same time, means something big is going to happen.
