Dave Bliss is out of work again.
Bliss recently resigned from his head coaching job at Southwestern Christian, an NAIA school in Bethany, Oklahoma days after the Showtime documentary, “Disgraced” that took another look at the murder of Patrick Dennehy, a 21-year old player who was murdered by teammate Carlos Dotson in 2003, when Bliss was in charge of the rouge basketball program at Baylor, aired. Dennehy’s badly decomposed body was found in a gravel pit near Waco weeks later.
Dotson, who confessed to the murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He has never explained the motive. Bliss was fired after he was caught on tape trying to get two other players to lie to the local sheriff and the NCAA and tell them a fabricated story that Dennehy was a drug dealer who paid his tuition and brought a Chevy Tahoe with drug money.
“If there’s a way we can create the perception that Pat may be a dealer,” Bliss was heard saying to the players in 2002, in recordings secretly made by assistant Abar Rouse, who was threatened with losing his job if he didn’t go along with the scheme to discredit Dennehy. “Even if we had to kind of make some things look a little better than they are, that could save us.
Bliss thought he could save the program and his job with a lie. The Waco police department said no evidence ever emerged to substantiate Bliss’ claims.
The truth is, Dennehy was never on scholarship and his $40,000 tuition was being paid by Bliss after he transferred from New Mexico without a scholarship.
Bliss was forced to resign in disgrace and was banned from coaching for a 10-year period by the NCAA.
“The bizarre circumstances painted me into a corner, and I chose to wrong way to react,” Bliss said at the time.
After the penalty expired, Southwestern Christian, who believed Bliss’ story that he was born again, gave him a second chance when they hired him as their head coach in 2015.
Bliss coached Southwestern to a 40-28 record in two years before he created revisionist history again, repeating his Dennehy allegation for the filming of Showtime’s documentary. Bliss, thinking he was not being recorded, repeated his claims that Dennehy was a drug dealer. “He was selling drugs,” Bliss said. “He sold to all the white guys on campus. . . He was the worst.”
Then he added this: “What I did was, I got in the mud with pigs. I paid a price and the pigs liked it.”
Before the documentary aired, Southwestern Christian and Bliss parted ways with Bliss being allowed to resign and president Reggie Wenyika said in a statement the school would pursue “new leadership in a manner that is consistent with the university’s beliefs, standards and policies, as a duty to our Christian heritage of providing a values-driven education, and accountability to our stakeholders and the public good.”
