Following an investigation, the coaching staff for the University of Kentucky's cheerleading program was dismissed, the university announced Monday. They weren't dismissed for poor performance, though, like Wake Forest men's basketball coach Danny Manning.

They were dismissed for encouraging and enabling hazing.

There is reason to believe that the staff overlooked things like throwing squad members into a lake without being fully clothed as well as failing to confiscate alcohol to the point where some of the squad members required medical attention.

The university itself cited it as "... lax oversight by the program's coaches and advisor."

In the report published by the university, the initial complaint reads as follows:

I received a call from XXXXXXX regarding the cheerleading team. She informed me that the squad was on a boat, drinking was involved, and the cheerleaders were encouraged to go topless. She also said during the retreat in [Tennessee], the cheerleaders were required to stand up on a table and sing a song that had major sexual content. After they sang it once, they were encouraged to sing it again with their clothes off. She said [both the cheerleading advisor] T. Lynn [Williamson] and the head coach, [Jomo Thompson] were there. She said that a previous assistant coach, Debbie [Love] videotaped this as one point but was forced to remove the video from her phone.

The entire report is disgusting, and it goes into detail about what the cheerleaders, both male and female, were asked to do or not told to stop doing in several instances.

Now, I get it. You might be thinking that the cheerleaders are old enough to make their own decisions and when you're a member of a sports team representing a university or professional organization, there is a certain code of conduct that should be upheld and is expected from the athletes.

In fact, the University of Kentucky's student-athlete handbook states, "All student-athletes are expected to be good citizens, good students, and meet performance expectations in their sport.

The handbook goes so far as to say that financial aid may be lost if the athlete "engages in serious misconduct warranting substantial disciplinary action."

I would imagine that throwing your teammate into water without being fully clothed warrants serious misconduct.

But if the coaching staff doesn't hold the team accountable for that standard, who else will? By standing by and letting this happen, the coaching staff became enablers. They allowed reprehensible behavior to occur on their watch, and at the end of the day, if coaches aren't looking out for their athletes, what are they doing?

The cheerleaders weren't blameless in the situation, but the coaches had the authority to stop it and shut it down... but they didn't.

That's why it's on them.

It's on coaches when teams make poor choices to redirect them, to not look the other way just because an athlete is talented.

No championship is worth hurting or harming other athletes.

What if medical attention hadn't helped the girls who drank too much in sight of the coaching staff?

What if they didn't have a happy ending on the other side?

The type of behavior that they sat back and observed was life-threatening behavior, and at the moment, there was no guarantee those girls would have made it out on the other side.

The team has won 24 championships since 1985. Clearly, it's an elite program when it comes to the athletes' skills and the coaches' coaching abilities on the floor, but being a coach doesn't stop there.

Being a coach is about leading on and off the court, and simply saying, "Well, I didn't encourage them to do it, but I didn't stop them either." isn't enough.

It's not enough to be passive.

It's not enough to watch this stuff go on and just allow it to continue.

We need to demand better of our coaches molding and shaping our student-athletes because otherwise, we have a lot of championships to our name but nothing else to show for it.