Let’s not use Baylor’s Sweet 16 run as the focus of a trite redemption narrative, OK?

On Tuesday, USA Today published a story by college sports writer George Schroeder headlined “Baylor basketball looks to inspire school amid continuing scandal.” Here’s how the piece begins:

As he bounced off the floor the other night in Tulsa, celebrating a berth in the Sweet 16, Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades paused for a moment.

“We needed this,” he said — and then he was gone, headed for the tunnel, stopping only for hugs and high fives. But a few moments later, in a corridor beneath the arena, Rhoades and others acknowledged the meaning was more than the typical March narrative.

The article fits a genre familiar to anyone who follows college sports: tales of universities or athletic departments overcoming the odious things they have done to redeem themselves amid scandal.

Schroeder’s piece is certainly not the worst of this genre. The author acknowledges the systemic nature of Baylor’s sexual assault scandal and doesn’t cast doubt on the victims or apologize for the people directly complicit in the behavior and cover-up. But the article does paint the scandal as a barrier to hurdle, another chapter in a long-arcing narrative of redemption. And in doing so, it undercuts the gravity of dozens of alleged rapes by Baylor football players and the shocking indifference from the athletic department and administration.

The article makes clear that Baylor’s reputation won’t be healed by an NCAA Tournament run and that the entire institution is culpable for the football program’s scandal. But it still parrots quotes lamenting the basketball program’s Twitter mentions and describes the basketball players as suffering for the school’s sins. Both in and out of quotation marks, the piece depicts the basketball program as some kind of victim. Rhoades, the athletic director, is quoted talking about how much the basketball players have had to endure this season, as if their struggle should be center to any Baylor narrative.

Sure the players have had to “endure” some jeers and the road and angry tweets and other small indignities, but it’s pretty obvious that the primary victims of this sexual assault scandal were, you know, the victims of the sexual assault. Requesting that we feel sympathy for basketball players because they have been inconvenienced by someone else’s trauma is whole a lot to ask.

The bottom line isn’t that Schroeder did a tasteless job with his Baylor redemption piece. It’s that a Baylor redemption piece is tasteless inherently.

The scandal at Baylor was not the case of a few bad actors. This was an entire institution harboring a poisonous culture and then neglecting the victims of that culture. The guilty president, athletic director and football coach are no longer in Waco, but it’s naive to think the problem has been fully stamped out. Baylor, as a university, deserves no sympathy. Baylor, as a university, deserves scorn.

That’s not to say that Baylor basketball players should be hated, derided or painted as evil. But there’s no reason they should be celebrated or praised more than any other basketball players. As far as we know, they had nothing to do with the sexual assault scandal, so there’s no reason to bring them into a narrative about the sexual assault scandal.

Basketball cannot redeem a university for enabling its students to be raped. Not one iota of the real damage caused by sexual assault at Baylor is undone by 3-pointers, dunks and blocked shots. No victim is un-raped, no woman is un-scared, no culture is un-codified.

The Baylor basketball team reaching the Sweet 16 means the Baylor basketball team reached the Sweet 16. Nothing more.