Dave Bliss' cozy office on the Allen Academy campus sits 77 1/2 miles from where he became a national pariah.
A football on a bookcase is emblazoned with the Texas A&M logo. A small print of a Monet painting hangs on the wall. There's no immediate sign of the college basketball coaching career that ended in shame at Baylor University.
But he keeps in his desk some basketball cards with a picture of him speaking to a player in a gold Baylor uniform. If asked, he'll talk about his time at the Waco school, but he speaks quickly and seems to look for the first opportunity to change the subject.
To many, it's surprising that Bliss ever made it back to working in a school. In the wake of what some call the most sordid scandal in college sports history, his return to coaching seemed impossible.
When he left the profession in 2003, his promising junior forward Patrick Dennehy was dead -- his body found in a Waco gravel pit with a bullet wound to the head. Dennehy's teammate, Carlton Dotson, was in jail. Dotson would later confess to shooting Dennehy and receive a 35-year prison sentence. And Bliss was effectively banned from college coaching for 10 years.
But Bliss refused to accept the conventional wisdom and followed a path back to coaching that took him through Colorado, North Dakota and Taiwan. In May, Allen Academy decided to give him a second chance. He'll be head basketball coach, dean of students and athletic director. The first day of school is less than a month away, and Bliss has spent the summer preparing to teach his life's lesson to the school's 330 students: Failure isn't final.
"In relating the importance of integrity and character and all those, I will share my story," Bliss said. "And they will say, 'Wow, maybe he should be able to talk about that because he has been down that road.'"
'I panicked'
Bliss arrived at Baylor in 1999 with a reputation as a program-builder. In previous coaching stints at Oklahoma, SMU and New Mexico, he took over struggling teams and guided them to the NCAA Tournament.
But he wasn't experiencing that kind of success at Baylor. By 2002, his team had achieved just one winning season, and he was feeling pressure on the recruiting trail.
Of the five players he was luring to Baylor for the 2002-03 season, four of them risked becoming academically ineligible. Bliss said he was concerned that he would have too few players to field a team, so he sought commitments from two other athletes as "insurance."
Then all the recruits qualified, Bliss said, and he was left with more players than available scholarships. That's a common situation in college athletics, and most coaches rescind scholarship offers to the least-promising players. Bliss handled it a different way.
"I felt badly because I really had spoken to their families and encouraged them to turn down other schools," Bliss said. "I thought in my mind that the other kids weren't going to make it, so when they made it, you can imagine how surprised I was."
The deadline for the extra players to transfer had passed, and Bliss said he began searching for a way to keep them in Waco.
"We tried bank loans and we tried grants and everything, but I wasn't able to come up with enough pay to complete the scholarship," he said.
So Bliss began paying two students' tuition himself, he said. According to a 54-page NCAA infractions report, he gave Dennehy, a New Mexico transfer, more than $10,000 in extra benefits during the 2002-03 school year. Documents state that Bliss also helped Dennehy purchase a used SUV and intervened when a dealership held the car when the student couldn't pay a repair bill. The other student received more than $20,000, the report alleged.
Such violations of NCAA rules would easily have sunk Bliss, but the lengths he took to cover them up and the way they came to light brought him national scorn.
On June 19, 2003, Dennehy's parents reported their son missing, saying they hadn't heard from him for eight days. On June 23, an informant told investigators that Dotson, Dennehy's teammate, told a cousin that he shot the missing athlete. Two days later, the car that Bliss helped Dennehy buy was found in a Virginia parking lot.
"The murder occurred about two months after I paid for the scholarships and what that did was it unearthed the aspect of how [Dennehy] got in the school," Bliss said. "I panicked ... and quite often the cover-up is worse than the crime."
As authorities searched for Dennehy and probed into his life for clues, Bliss worried that evidence of his cheating would surface. Coaches knew that some Baylor players smoked marijuana and their failed blood tests weren't reported to the authorities.
Knowing that NCAA investigators would question how Dennehy paid his tuition, Bliss constructed a story saying the athlete dealt drugs. He suggested that his players rehearse the story before telling it to police and the NCAA. An assistant coach, Abar Rouse, recorded Bliss and gave the tapes to investigators.
Bliss resigned on Aug. 8, 2003 -- a day after consoling Dennehy's family members at the player's funeral.
About a week later, Rouse's tapes were leaked to the press.
"We can get out of this jam," Bliss could be heard saying to a player in one tape. "And, see, if Dotson hadn't killed Dennehy, we wouldn't be in this jam. So we don't deserve to be in this jam. The reason we're in this jam is because of a dead guy and a guy that murdered him, and that isn't fair for you and me and Abar to be in this jam, because we didn't do anything. It's not like we created this situation. We're the victims."
In 2005, the NCAA released a report that said Bliss and his assistants "brought incalculable disgrace to themselves, the university and intercollegiate athletics as a whole." The agency banned Bliss from coaching college sports without NCAA permission until 2015.
A road back to Texas
The 66-year-old Bliss has a hyper, upbeat personality. He talks quickly and seems unable to sit completely still. So when he retreated to Colorado after the scandal, he said he felt restless.
He took odd jobs at a couple of retail stores and a golf course. He stayed near basketball by volunteering as an assistant for his son's high school team.
"I just did things because I have done something my whole life and to sit around made it worse," he said. "Idle hands are the devil's playground."
In 2005, he took a job with the Dakota Wizards, a minor league team in North Dakota. The team struggled, and Bliss said he missed his family. He quit after one year.
"I knew right then I didn't need to be in Bismarck, North Dakota," he said. "I wanted to do things that were constructive and repair my life."
He returned to Denver, started an online occupational training company and yearned to return to coaching.
"Coaching is not a job, and it is not a profession," he said. "It is truly a ministry because kids can be reached and encouraged as in no other room in the whole school because they choose to play basketball. And that is why to violate my real beliefs really impacted me. I think God did an autopsy on me during all this. I wasn't raised that way, but the competitive world of college athletics has changed a lot of people's minds."
Bliss' greatest failures made him infinitely more famous than his biggest successes. For most of the country, he was permanently tagged as the coach who presided over the most shameful incident in college sports history. He said he's to come to terms with that.
"There was a period where I was going to go around and try to change everyone's mind one at a time, and that would have taken a better part of the century," Bliss said. "I did go through that period where I wanted to tell people that I was a good person that did a bad thing, but I found out that I was a bad person who occasionally does a good thing. Because we are all sinners and we have in us the capability of bad as well as good and only through a relationship with Jesus Christ can you attain the sustenance of good."
In 2007, a friend of Bliss' wife called him and told him -- didn't ask, but told him -- to speak to the Dallas Salesmanship Club, a charity that raises money to educate troubled children. As a coach, Bliss had addressed alumni groups dozens of times, but he said he was nervous about his first public appearance after the scandal.
"There was like 1,000 members," he said. "But I looked out there and I had coached most of their alma maters. I knew a lot of them and, not that it was a safe zone, but it was something that was cathartic to a certain extent."
He gave no excuse for his failures, but offered his story to show how people can lose sight of what's important. It's a lesson he now delivers frequently.
Bliss compares himself to a person driving the opposite way on a highway who blinks his headlights and warns people of danger.
"I want to tell people to hang on and stay strong and don't give into the world," Bliss said. "Don't give into bad decisions, and if you do, don't give into thinking that it is over."
He received a standing ovation at that first speech.
The next year, he was invited to give an interview in front of about 500 coaches at the NCAA Final Four in San Antonio. He again showed remorse, and was again received warmly.
His Final Four appearance led to an invitation to coach Athletes in Action, a team that practices worldwide Christian ministry, in a Taiwanese tournament. He held Bible studies in the mornings and guided the team to a second-place finish at night.
That success inspired him to return to Texas, where his daughter had given birth to his first granddaughter in Kyle. Bliss mentored athletes, gave speeches at power lunches and churches and volunteered to help a local high school team.
"When their coach left, they asked me to think about coaching there, but I didn't have my certification and that wasn't a possibility," he said.
The offer caused him to consider returning to coaching full-time, but the only place he could do that was at a private school. While skimming the website for Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, he noticed an opening at Allen Academy. He drove to Bryan on a Friday and looked around the campus. He returned with his resume and application on Monday.
A second chance
Bliss has worked at Allen Academy for less than three summer months -- he hasn't seen a day of class -- but he talks passionately about his plans for the school.
During a recent tour, he pointed out the expansion of the basketball gym, the football field's new turf and plans for a science and technology building. After a seven-year break, he's back to his job of building programs.
"Our enrollment isn't what we would like it to be, our teams aren't performing at the level we want them to perform at, but that is going to change," he said.
John Rouse, the school's superintendent, said he was in Colorado when he heard that Bliss applied for the job. Rouse said he knew a little about Bliss' past, and began an independent investigation.
"The stuff you see on the web is pretty negative, but by the time I talked to the real players involved, I found it's not the way it was presented in the media," Rouse said. "Unfortunately, the media only picks up on the negatives."
The former coach's application came with multiple recommendations, including one from former Baylor president Robert Sloan and another one from former A&M women's basketball coach Lynn Hickey.
Bliss said the Baylor scandal was an "elephant in the room" during his job interview. He said he confronted the issue directly, and answered any questions Rouse and the board of trustees had. The board's vote to hire him was unanimous and he immediately turned his focus to putting parents' minds at ease.
"I don't want to be maudlin, but I do want them to know that the same person who did that really cares about their son or daughter," Bliss said. "I have good intentions on helping them raise their young people, and I think I can help."
In May, he spoke to parents in a packed auditorium, giving a 30-minute speech and then addressing them one-on-one for another half hour. Reactions ranged from skeptical to optimistic.
"Everybody deserves a second chance, I suppose," said parent Linda Clark after the meeting. "And I don't know him, so it's hard for me to pass judgment on what he did or didn't do. The question becomes: Do I have time to wait and see if he means what he says or is this all smoke and mirrors?"
The hiring brought national attention to the tiny school. And it shocked Brian Brabazon, Dennehy's stepfather.
"I don't think it was right, especially being around kids younger than college age," he said in a telephone interview. "Why should Dave Bliss be given a second chance? If Bliss would have gotten away with this, he wouldn't be doing the things he's doing today. It's ridiculous. Retire. Go away. I don't know what the school was thinking."
But Bliss said he is only worried about the students and their parents. If they can relate to him and learn from his past, he will be successful, he said.
"When I look back on my coaching career, I had a lot of good things happen to me and I really appreciate those things, but, while my college career is over, there is a lot of things I think I can help with," he said. "I really enjoy trying to help young people keep their lives from going down paths they don't anticipate. But if it does go down that path, it is still not over."
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