Foul Trouble: The Coach Who Used a Murder to Hide a Smaller Crime

Patrick Dennehy was murdered by his own teammate. His head coach’s response was to invent a second crime for the victim, on tape, to hide a smaller one of his own.

The Disappearance

Patrick Dennehy, a junior forward who had transferred to Baylor from the University of New Mexico, went missing in early June 2003. His remains were found weeks later in a gravel field outside Waco, where he and teammate Carlton Dotson had reportedly gone to shoot guns at targets. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. Dotson was arrested that July after fleeing to Maryland, was charged with murder, and pleaded guilty five days before his scheduled 2005 trial. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The Tapes

While Dennehy was still missing, a newly hired assistant coach named Abar Rouse began secretly recording conversations with head coach Dave Bliss. On the tapes, Bliss can be heard coaching players on what to tell the sheriff’s department and NCAA investigators: that Dennehy had been dealing drugs, and that the cash he carried came from those sales rather than from Bliss. Bliss told one player that if they could create the perception that Dennehy had been a dealer, “that could save us.” Rouse turned the tapes over to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and to NCAA investigators.

What the Money Actually Was

Baylor’s internal investigation, followed by the NCAA’s, found no evidence Dennehy had ever sold drugs. What investigators did find was that Bliss had paid up to $40,000 in tuition for two players and had improperly solicited roughly $87,000 more from boosters, both clear NCAA violations. They also found that coaching staff had failed to report players’ positive drug tests. Bliss resigned in August 2003, once Baylor’s investigative committee requested his bank records and it became clear the tapes would surface publicly.

The Sanctions, and What Came After Them

In June 2005, the NCAA banned Baylor’s basketball program from non-conference play for a full season, extended its probation through 2010, and issued Bliss a ten-year show-cause penalty, a sanction that effectively barred any NCAA program from hiring him without special permission. An NCAA official called Baylor’s violations as serious as those that led to the SMU football program’s 1987 “death penalty,” the only time the NCAA has ever fully shut down a program.

The show-cause period eventually expired. Bliss went on to coach at Southwestern Christian University, an NAIA program, and was still coaching as recently as 2018, fifteen years after the scandal. In 2017, a Showtime documentary resurfaced the case, and Bliss, on camera, doubled down on the drug-dealer claim rather than retracting it. He resigned from that job days after the documentary aired.

Why This Case Matters

This is the clearest cover-up in this franchise so far because the timeline leaves no ambiguity. Bliss did not stumble into a bad public statement. He rehearsed a false narrative with players, aimed it at a murder victim who could not respond, and did it specifically to protect himself from a much smaller violation. The NCAA’s ten-year penalty was severe by the standards of college sports discipline. It was also, eventually, over, and nothing in Division I or NAIA governance stopped Bliss from returning to coach teenagers for another decade once the clock ran out.