  We study nonleptonic decays of the orbitally excited, \su6 \rep{70}-plet
baryons in order to test the hypothesis that the successes of the
nonrelativistic quark model have a natural explanation in the large-$N_c$ limit
of QCD. By working in a Hartree approximation, we isolate a specific set of
operators that contribute to the observed s- and d-wave decays in leading order
in $1/N_c$. We fit our results to the current experimental decay data, and make
predictions for a number of allowed but unobserved modes. Our tentative
conclusion is that there is more to the nonrelativistic quark model of baryons
than large-$N_c$.
