During the investigation, the Duke season was canceled after eight games. Pressler was painted as an aloof, if not enabling, leader whose undisciplined team had already had recurrent run-ins with the law. He was fired after 16 seasons with the Blue Devils.

His home, in Duke Forest, was within earshot of the public-address system at the football stadium. It soon became the epicenter of a national uproar. Television trucks parked in his front yard. Pressler could not go for a jog without hearing helicopters hovering overhead. His house was vandalized, he received threatening emails and his daughters were taunted in school.

“The longer we stayed in that environment,” Pressler said, “the less healthy it was for myself and, especially, my family.”

He added, “There was just too much going on in a negative way to subject my family to any more of that, especially since I was no longer the coach.”

Pressler recounted many of those memories in a book, “It’s Not About The Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Lives It Shattered,” published in 2008 as a promise fulfilled to his Duke players on his final day as coach. He has returned to the Duke campus only twice, for funerals in the university chapel. (Pressler reached a confidential settlement agreement with Duke in 2010 on a breach-of-contract suit brought over slanderous remarks by a former senior administrator to the news media.)

“Smithfield is home,” Pressler said. “It’s been eight terrific years for the family.”

As the rape investigation simmered into August 2006, Bryant Athletic Director Bill Smith called a friend from high school, Joe Alberici, the Army coach and a former Pressler assistant. Smith said he needed to use caution to bring Pressler on campus for an interview. After all, he was the most recognizable disgraced coach in the United States.

Smith listened to recommendations from Alberici and others, followed news media reports and read what James E. Coleman Jr., a Duke law professor, and a faculty committee had written about the case and Pressler’s role. He said he concluded that hiring Pressler was a “no brainer.”