Bliss has bottomed out.(College Basketball)

No coach ever had been in the situation Dave Bliss found himself in this summer: one player missing and presumed dead, another player the chief suspect in the case. There was no handbook to educate Bliss on handling such a situation, no colleague who could explain how he managed a similar jam.

Under the most extreme pressure--and this certainly qualified--a person can reveal much about his or her character. Sometimes, we discover things we'd rather not have known.

"How badly has Dave Bliss ruined our profession?" a Division I coach asked me last week. The answer is depressing.

In trying to enlist Baylor players and assistant coaches in a scheme to misdirect the university's investigation of the basketball program by manufacturing a slander of the late Patrick Dennehy, Bliss did more to dishonor his vocation than all the disgraced former coaches combined. Compared with Bliss, Jerry Tarkanian, Tates Locke, Clem Haskins and Todd Bozeman look like the faces on Mount Rushmore.

Bliss was in a position to demonstrate the grace and courage that once was expected from coaches. Had he met that standard, he would have departed Baylor with dignity--even if it meant leaving with the stain of NCAA rules violations on his record.

But that didn't matter much when measured against the death of a 21-year-old whose promising future was stolen from him by two bullets to the skull. What mattered was paying respect to the victim, identifying his assailant and--to a much smaller degree---rescuing the future of Baylor basketball.

Bliss had plenty of time after Dennehy's disappear ante to consider all that. The stress upon Bliss was enormous, but it is unfathomable he would react with a self-preservationist panic that demonstrated no regard for the victim, for Baylor's players or assistants, for the profession Bliss was a part of for three decades at various universities or for the truth.