UT vs Baylor the last 12 seasons since the lost title game. Recruiting rankings since...UT 9.4 avg. Baylor 36 avg. We've had 4 top 3 classes and 8 top 10 Baylor was at rock bottom 12 years ago, and again in '17, and we've waddled in mediocrity ever since. Baylor has had 3 8-1 conference seasons, and our best is two seasons with 2 conference losses. It's a culture thing, with too many cooks in the kitchen! Money can't buy everything...also in reference to the Ewers thread...just saying.
Baylor's very own, good at coaching college football dude, Art Briles, is surely looking for a job...
I wasn't alluding to the locker room, but the BMDs or whoever is in charge of hiring coaches. I just don't believe every head coach or position coach is the problem, unless we just suck at picking good candidates. Why always choose the hottest names?
We can keep making excuses about wokeness or negative recruiting or NIL or whatever else is taking their hive mind off of football (fat little girlfriends?) but the fact that Aranda can win the conference the year after going 2-7 shows that coaching is putting all of those ducks in a row. It's not like Baylor doesn't have any issues with those aforementioned problems. They just know how to set that stuff aside when it's put-up-or-shut-up time. And we're not mentally tough enough because we haven't had a coach get us there since we sleepwalked through the end of the 2009 season.
Sark did better in year 1. I have said I think he is the guy, so while I doubt we win a title next year, I think we win more games.
Is it culture? Sure. Talent? Sure. Coaching. Sure. Player development? Sure. It’s all the above. But I put coaching and player development at the top of the list, and recruiting + portal a very close 2nd. I will also add that the EOT controversy under Herman was a unique and singular event. Aranda deserves tremendous credit. So did Ruhle before him. It’s hard to argue that he did what he did with even equal talent…
Culture can mean a lot of different things. It’s funny how some fixated people assume you were talking about the locker room. my money is ths is a bigger problem than the locker room since we’ve had 100% turnover several times over in the locker room and nothing has changed. Couldnt be us, could it? Nah...
So, are we just unlucky in picking coaches, and worse at coaching and worse at developing better talent. My recolection is Baylor has had as many coaching changes the past 12 years and at least one huge cultural problem, but manage to put a better product on the field with less talent, right?
"Yes" to both parts of your first sentence. My thoughts about Baylor are that Briles (sans scandal), Ruhle, and Aranda are better coaches than Mack Brown 2010-2013, Strong, Herman, and probably also Sark 2021 but unbeknownst for 2022-beyond. I think the common denominator for those coaching issues was that ours put us in a position to show up for the games and theirs put them in a position to compete. This couldn't have been more apparent than the 2021 game against them, but I'll go further and say that we've only had 2 "impressive" games against them since 2010. I don't think the talent issue with player development is as big as people think. Players don't just forget how to play hard. But we're definitely not putting those players in a scheme or position to win if we keep experiencing the same problems... which goes back to coaching. We shouldn't be giving up 21 straight points to BU with a 21-10 lead in the 2nd half. A lot of our 2021 problems seem to be rooted in misunderstanding. I don't know how much time they spend in the film room, but getting those tendencies down during the week is supposed to prevent all of those 2nd half collapses we had. And I think therein lies the difference between OK State, ISU, etc. and us as well. They know exactly how to break us, and we didn't have a clue.
