I don't know why I always feel compelled to point out any area of absurdity in this show, but it just seems important to keep it real. No way would Coach Woods be fired.

You can't fire someone for not being able to find out the name of a sexual harassment victim. By the time Whitney came to her, the coach had already given her statement. How could she know which black girl the bus driver saw with Dalton? She quite honestly didn't know.

Also, in this case, they didn't even need the name of the victim. In real life, the last thing a college wants is the name of the victim. They don't want to deal with lawsuits and rights and all that. They just want the problem to go away as quickly and quietly as possible. They did their due diligence simply by doing the investigation. They even fired Dalton, which is, quite frankly, a bit unbelievable — all they had on him was a google search and a bus driver who couldn't even identify the alleged victim, leaving them open to a wrongful termination lawsuit. All that's left is to hand out the sexual harassment brochures to the students, letting them know how to report, etc, and they're done here.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, someone somehow told the committee that Whitney came to the coach to ask for anonymity. The only person who could know that is Whitney's friend, right? Or Coach Woods' wife? The two people least likely to blab anything. But let's say they did. The committee is going to fire a coach because she found out who the victim was after she gave her statement? And didn't tell anyone because the victim asked her not to? The school would be sued in a heartbeat for violating the victim's privacy. For no reason, because wtf is the school going to do with this information? They already fired Dalton. Are they going to give the victim a confetti parade?

Plus! If the school knows who the victim is, they know that she's the daughter of a fucking senator! Someone most likely to happen to know a battalion of lawyers, and most likely to rain a hellstorm down on the school.

No way would Coach Woods be fired.

"Yet," you say, "it's just a sitcom! Why does it matter?" Because it's a sitcom that purports to address real issues that college women — all women — face. It does itself and its audience a disservice by making these issues ridiculous. It's like that 1960s TV show Hogan's Heroes, which was a comedy set in a WWII German prison camp (thereby making the Nazis look not all that bad.) It's disrespectful as hell to twist reality into some soap opera entertainment and call it progressive.

I mean, idk if some 17-year old is watching this and getting the idea that if she wants to maintain anonymity when reporting abuse, assault or harassment that the person she confides in will get fired. Maybe not. Hopefully not. But adding in this tortured storyline means, at best, sacrificing a storyline about what might actually happen in real life. A storyline about something real. Something that real women have to deal with. I'm not asking for a "very special episode." Just give us a thread on which to suspend our disbelief.