The Baylor board of regents deserves every bit of the withering -- and growing -- criticism they face these days. However, it's important not to lose sight of one critical point in this dog pile: While much has been written about a 2012 gang rape accusation involving football players, that report alone is not what led to former coach Art Briles' firing.

As board chair Ron Murff said last Friday: "The change in leadership of the football program was not based on any single incident, but on the weight of the information presented to us and a pattern of poor decisions over a range of disciplinary issues, not just sexual assault."

That's a variation on what regent James Gray told The Dallas Morning News editorial board Nov. 3: The reason Briles was fired was because "he delegated down discipline and he operated a system where he was the last to know when he needed to be the first to know."

Many in the pro-Briles camp remain dead-sure that the former coach did nothing wrong. His lawyer, Ernest Cannon, also insists Briles did nothing wrong. Mega-donor Drayton McLane, whose name adorns Baylor's football stadium, says he wants to see Briles' honor "restored" and any evidence that led to his dismissal publicly released by the school's board of regents.

The Dallas Morning News continues to ask both for a written report of the Pepper Hamilton investigation into the scandal and for the details that led regents to tell the Wall Street Journal of incidents involving sexual assault reports by 17 women concerning 19 football players, including four gang rapes.

Foiled against all that, comments that former Title IX coordinator Patty Crawford made to me Nov. 2 about football assault reports provide possible answers.

I sat down with Crawford for about 90 minutes after she, several regents and administration leaders were featured on a 60 Minutes Sports episode regarding the handling of sexual assault accusations at Baylor.

While Crawford has been steadfast that the sexual violence issues at the school are campus-wide -- not confined to just the football program -- she says survivors' stories regarding football players have been the most horrific. Among them were accounts of a hazing ritual that involved gang rapes.

Before I go into the details, I'd like to say that Crawford's top priority is the young Baylor women with whom she talked -- often at length and often late into the evening. Likewise, survivors gave her high marks in their dealings with her.

It's also important to note that I have no independent evidence to corroborate what Crawford told me; neither do I have evidence to dispute what she is saying. Again, this speaks to why students and parents deserve to know the details of the Pepper Hamilton report, which undoubtedly included details about football-related gang rape allegations, as referenced in the Wall Street Journal story.

Crawford's sensitivities, as well as my own, led us to agree to tell this story as carefully as possible, offering a general outline without getting into graphic detail.

You might ask, "Why tell it then?" While we recognize the need to be extremely cautious, we also see an equal danger in not talking about it. Especially when it comes to protecting future students at campuses everywhere.

Crawford told me that by February 2015, a little more than three months after Baylor hired her, she began hearing from women who had a dreadful narrative to relate. They described what sounded to Crawford like a hazing ritual that had gone on as recently as the 2011-12 school year in which freshman football players took the women to parties where they suffered "the most disgusting, sickening, violent" assaults by older players.

One of the women told Crawford that the gang rapes were videoed and that she learned what had happened to her only when a football player showed her the recording. "It was like a hazing situation based on seniority in the football program," Crawford told me.

According to Crawford, the women who came forward or agreed to be interviewed by the Title IX team mostly didn't want to provide names. They said the players involved had graduated, as had some of the women who were assaulted. Crawford says that no one indicated to her that Briles knew about the hazing allegations.

In one case, a survivor told her that she feared not only that the former player who raped her would kill her for talking but would kill Crawford and her family as well.

Mostly, these women just wanted to be heard by someone who cared. But the Title IX coordinator clearly had an obligation to investigate and do her best to assure this hazing culture wasn't still in play.

Crawford knew that one football player still at the university in spring 2015 had a connection with the women who had reported the hazing, so she talked with then-athletic director Ian McCaw about speaking with him. Crawford recalled: "I needed to ask this guy does this happen, is there a ritual? When you were a freshman were you told to bring women to these parties? And then they were showing the videos around campus?"

After two-plus weeks of negotiations, she says, her office was allowed to talk to the unidentified player. Interviewed by a Baylor Title IX investigator, he mostly shrugged off the accusations, Crawford said. He maintained any sex was consensual and that no pictures or videos existed. And he did some victim-blaming.

In the end, Crawford could never prove that a hazing ritual involving gang rape occurred before she arrived in November 2014, primarily, she says, because the older players and some of the survivors of the attacks had left the university. But she absolutely believes the hazing took place.

For starters, too many of the details that the women described, independently, to Crawford squared with other facts the Title IX team turned up. And what these women said and how they conveyed their stories resonated with Crawford's experience with other survivors of sexual assault.

Crawford believes that the Pepper Hamilton investigators may have learned more about the narrative of gang rapes-as-hazing ritual than she was able to. And in one of the most astonishing pieces of this story, Crawford knows no more about what the Philadelphia law firm told the regents than any of the rest of us. The sad fact is that not even the Title IX coordinator heard the details of what Pepper Hamilton turned up.

This is just more evidence of why regents need to secure and release a written report about who failed and how. Men and women currently on the Baylor campus as well as parents who are considering sending their children there deserve answers.

Crawford resigned Oct. 3 and filed a federal complaint with the Department of Education that said Baylor had fallen out of Title IX compliance and had retaliated against her trying to get Baylor to comply with Title IX. Baylor's response focused on its significant progress on the Pepper Hamilton Title IX recommendations. Education Department policy is not to discuss the case until its resolution.

(See DMN pending requests to Baylor for more info related to these issues.)

Baylor's former Title IX coordinator now is trying to move on with her life and focus on her own family; she was picking up her children from school when we talked again by phone yesterday. She takes some comfort in knowing that she did everything in her power to help the women of Baylor and in knowing, in her words, that "I did the right thing. I was open and transparent and honest."

While the truth is difficult to determine at present in the well-publicized he-said-she-said between Crawford and her former boss, senior vice president and chief operating officer Reagan Ramsower, the 34-year-old former Title IX coordinator is adamant about this: "I have nothing but the truth - and my integrity intact. The truth stands. And the truth will keep coming out."