Article tells how Aranda fought for his job with this AD before the last game of last year, armed with a plan to take over defensive play calling, bringing in GP, doubling NIL investment and yes this: Taking less character guys. And oh, he kept his job with a bigger reason, $20 million buyout. 👀
theathletic.com
By Sam Khan Jr.
7h ago
11
WACO, Texas — Late on the morning of Baylor’s 2023 season finale, while his football team passed time at the Hilton Waco, head coach Dave Aranda was two miles away in his boss’ office, fighting for his job.
Most athletic directors and coaches meet soon after the end of the season to dissect the past and discuss the future. That sit-down is often the moment when underperforming coaches are fired or given another chance.
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Aranda preferred not to wait. He wanted to make his case for continued employment to AD Mack Rhoades before the Bears’ finale, a 34-31 loss to West Virginia that brought a nightmarish 3-9 season to its merciful conclusion.
Aranda entered Rhoades’ office in Baylor’s Simpson Center carrying a paper-clipped two-page document with notes, bullet points and highlighted text. For the next 90 minutes, he detailed a plan to revive a league-worst defense, retool on offense and alter the program’s roster-building approach. He delivered his vision with an edge and confidence that reminded Rhoades of his initial interview with Aranda four years ago, one day after Aranda had won the national championship as LSU’s defensive coordinator.
Afterward, Rhoades and deputy athletic director Jovan Overshown processed Aranda’s plan. “I left that meeting, and I said this to Jovan: ‘That’s the Dave I know,’” Rhoades said. “I feel pretty dang good that he’s going to be able to execute this.”
Baylor’s 2024 will be a fascinating experiment. Aranda’s hot seat status is unavoidable. Three sub-.500 seasons in four years could have easily justified dismissal last fall. But his one winning season was arguably the best in school history: Big 12 and Sugar Bowl titles and a top-five finish.
Baylor leaders believe in Aranda and love what he represents. They think he’s closer to the championship-winning coach he was in 2021 than the one whose team went a combined 9-16 in ‘22 and ‘23, and they were sold on his vision for a program-wide makeover. Aranda’s hefty buyout, which would have cost Baylor more than $20 million if he’d been fired after last season, also contributed to the decision to bring him back for one more year.
The Big 12 feels as wide open as ever entering its new 16-team era without Oklahoma and Texas. Baylor, with three conference titles in the last 11 years, healthy donor support and pristine facilities, should stake a claim in the top tier of the retooled conference.
But only if Aranda can make this experiment work.
“I need to feel like we’ve regained momentum,” Rhoades said. “I didn’t tell Dave there was a certain amount of games he has to win. I told him, ‘We can’t go 3-9 again.’”
Aranda is 23-25 in four seasons at Baylor. (Chris Jones / USA Today)
For a program that ranks 83rd among FBS teams in all-time winning percentage (.511) according to Winsipedia, it may seem odd that Baylor is a place where high expectations are justified. But the Bears’ recent history tells a different story.
From 2011 to ‘21, Baylor went 90-50 (.642), winning the Big 12 three times and playing for another conference title in 2019. Baylor is tied with Kansas State for the most Big 12 titles of any remaining member of the conference. That stretch spanned three head coaches: Art Briles, Matt Rhule and Aranda.
Briles was fired in 2016 following an investigation into sexual assault allegations against players in his program and his staff’s handling of them. Rhule left after Baylor’s 11-3 Big 12 runner-up season to take the Carolina Panthers job, which led to Aranda’s hiring.
The Bears have invested heavily in their infrastructure: McLane Stadium, which opened in 2014, cost more than $260 million. The Fudge Football Development Center, a new 100,000-square-foot headquarters for the program, will open in July with a $89.6 million price tag. After the 2021 Big 12 title, Aranda signed a contract extension through 2029 to fend off other suitors. Baylor’s future seemed solidified.
The following year, Baylor entered November still in contention for the conference championship game, but the Bears lost four straight to end that season. Their three wins last fall came over Big 12 newcomers Cincinnati and UCF by single digits — the latter requiring a miraculous 28-point comeback — and against Long Island, a 4-7 FCS team. In 2023, no Big 12 team scored fewer points or allowed more than Baylor.
The Bears had one-score losses to Utah, Kansas State, West Virginia and Houston but lost to five other Big 12 opponents by an average of 25.6 points. And, of course, there was the ominous season-opening 42-31 loss to Texas State in which Baylor trailed by double-digits multiple times.
Baylor leadership points to a young roster as a key factor in last year’s struggles. Last season, Baylor led the Big 12 in combined snaps played by freshmen, with more than 4,000, a thousand clear of the team with the next-most, Iowa State. The Bears were last in the conference in snaps played by seniors. By comparison, Baylor’s 2021 Big 12 title team had more than 13,000 combined snaps by seniors and just over 1,000 played by freshmen.
“I don’t think they were as talented as people thought they were,” said an opposing coach, summarizing a popular counterargument from those outside Waco.
Aranda’s plan to revive Baylor starts with returning to a previous version of himself: the defensive whiz who was the nation’s highest-paid assistant when Rhoades hired him away from LSU. Once at Baylor, Aranda tried to evolve from an ace defensive coordinator who happened to be head coach into a program-wide leader. “In years past, he really had his hands on everything,” Overshown said.
As a point of pride, Aranda doesn’t want to go out with a bad defense. Baylor allowed 6.58 yards per play last season. Aranda’s LSU defenses allowed 4.94 in four seasons. He will call that side of the ball this year and commit his time to the unit in a way he hasn’t since his arrival.
“You don’t have the success that he does, you’re not winning national championships without being one of the best defensive minds in the country,” Overshown said. “Let’s bring that here.”
At practice, Aranda is more hands-on than before. During individual drills, Aranda spends his time with the linebackers and position coaches Caleb Collins (outside LBs) and Jamar Chaney (inside LBs). Where the linebackers go, Aranda follows.
To compensate, he must pull back elsewhere. Scaling down his involvement in offensive meetings. Trusting others to handle their business, from position coaches to support staff and recruiting staff.
Pulling back also means fewer off-field obligations. Although he has been available to local reporters for typical post-practice spring football scrums, Aranda has turned down nearly every 1-on-1 interview request this offseason, including one for this story, in favor of spending his time on defense, according to a team spokesperson.
“With him helping at linebacker, on defense and being the head coach, that’s a lot to have on his plate,” receivers coach Dallas Baker said. The way Baker sees it, “I’m the head coach of my own room. So it’s not just on him, it’s on all of us.”
In his pitch to Rhoades and Overshown, Aranda emphasized the need for an offensive coordinator with head coaching experience to assist with the transition. After last season, he parted ways with Jeff Grimes, who revived the offense in 2021, and hired Cal offensive coordinator Jake Spavital, who spent four years as the head coach at Texas State.
Including Spavital, Baylor has six new position coaches. But the program’s most eyebrow-raising addition was Gary Patterson, the former longtime head coach at rival TCU.
Patterson joined the staff as a senior consultant, a role similar to the one he held at Texas in 2022 when he was a special assistant to head coach Steve Sarkisian. During a recent practice, Patterson spent most of his time standing well behind the defense, getting a big-picture view and jotting down notes on a small piece of paper.
Rhoades said hiring Patterson was Aranda’s idea; the coaches had a preexisting relationship. But Rhoades wanted to ensure Patterson’s motives for joining the staff were pure.
“I knew when we announced that a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, he just wants to be the next head coach.’ We had to talk through that,” Rhoades said. “You look at TCU’s track record during his tenure, pretty successful. He’s got a lot of wisdom, seen a lot of different things. I felt like he really wanted to help Dave.”
The expectation is that Patterson will be an asset to the staff not only schematically but also with leadership and other big-picture issues.
“He has found a neat way to kind of quietly navigate amongst the coaches,” Overshown said. “And Dave has a lot of respect for him. … He’s adding perspective and coaching up our coaches and helping Dave as he can. So it’s been really positive.”
Staff changes have been a constant in the Aranda era. He fired three offensive assistants after his first season. He fired his mentor, defensive coordinator Ron Roberts, following 2022. Counting Aranda as a de facto DC, this will be Baylor’s third set of new coordinators in five years. Since 2020, a total of 17 full-time assistant coaches either left for other opportunities, weren’t retained or were dismissed.
So why is this set of staff changes any different? Baylor leadership is betting on Aranda’s return to his schematic roots.
“There is a different persona that’s come about with Dave himself,” Overshown said. “You can see the commitment. You can see the trust in the guys. … There’s a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. You feel the edge. He is truly in the space that made him great.”
Asked if Aranda’s changed, Baker said, “Yes and no. He still doesn’t really yell at the coaches.”
Rhoades puts it more succinctly.
“He’s grumpier,” he said with a smile.
A deflating 42-31 loss to Texas State in Week 1 set the tone for Baylor’s disastrous 2023 campaign. (Raymond Carlin III / USA Today)
If the roster isn’t good enough to win, all that won’t matter. Aranda’s plan to address his talent deficit was threefold: retain the key members of the current roster, hold on to the 2024 recruiting class and find impact players in the transfer portal.
To accomplish those goals, Baylor modernized how it tackled NIL for the football program.
“We had name, image and likeness throughout the program, but it was a base level, everybody (gets) the same across the board,” Rhoades said. “But that’s not the world we’re living in anymore.”
Aranda originally subscribed to that approach to prevent potential locker room issues. He admitted in November that he was one of the reasons Baylor was behind competitively in NIL.
In collaboration with GXG, Baylor’s primary NIL collective, the Bears have ramped up their efforts to retain players and attract transfers. Overshown said NIL funding for football has “doubled” since last year and said GXG is working to ensure that NIL doesn’t stand in the way of Baylor landing or retaining a player.
“Because of what people have given, we can be far more aggressive,” Overshown said.
Rhoades said the Bears kept almost everyone they hoped to on the current roster. Baylor had two decommitments in December, but the majority of the high school recruiting class signed. And the Bears have added a dozen transfers so far, including former Toledo quarterback Dequan Finn and former Texas State receiver Ashtyn Hawkins, who each had decorated careers at their previous stops.
Aranda took only six scholarship transfers in the 2021 and 2022 offseasons combined. In the last two years, Baylor has signed 26. Last year Aranda admitted that his hesitance to use the portal following the Big 12 title run was a mistake. That conservative approach has contributed to the current roster predicament.
Aranda is also casting a wider net in recruiting. Before, he erred heavily on the side of culture fit. “If there’s 10 kids within the state of Texas that are playing football and have the grades to go to college, probably three of them fit at Baylor,” Aranda said in 2022.
The program emphasized “person over player,” which became an oft-used hashtag on Baylor football social media that Aranda worked into the fabric of the program. But two former staffers granted anonymity to discuss the program without permission from their current employers hypothesized that Aranda went too far in that direction when it came to recruiting, overlooking potential impact players with minor issues in the effort to find ones with impeccable character.
Rhoades said he discussed the balance of the roster with Aranda, challenging him on how many players he has who are great culture guys but may be thinner on talent. “If that’s a third of your roster or half of your roster, you’re not talented enough to win games,” Rhoades said. Conversely, taking too many risks in the name of talent is also problematic “because you’re spending all your energy making sure they’re always doing the right stuff.”
Changing gears meant looking at the roster holistically, rather than making sure every player checked every single box in Aranda’s ideal profile. Overshown said “person over player” is still vital to Baylor’s DNA, but the program is more mindful about how it brands itself. Notably, the team’s social media accounts haven’t used the hashtag since December.
“‘Person over player’ doesn’t have to be as forward-facing if it’s who you are,” Overshown said.
Aranda is hoping to duplicate the turnaround of Neal Brown (left), who went from job uncertainty to Big 12 contention in 2023. (Raymond Carlin III / USA Today)
So what must Aranda do to solidify the program and return in 2025?
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Rhoades said. “And there’s so many nuances to it. How hard you’re playing, scores in games, recruiting class. … I need to see an upward trajectory.”
Success is paramount, but leadership is rooting for this experiment to work.
“We want someone like Dave Aranda to succeed in this industry,” Overshown said. “He needs to. And when you speak about Baylor, he is synonymous with who we want to be from a person and character fit.” Rhoades calls him “one of the most genuine people I’ve met.”
Aranda’s introspective nature and willingness to admit shortcomings is refreshing. But his early reluctance to quickly adapt to college football’s ever-changing landscape contributed to Baylor’s current dilemma.
Rhoades said he believes Aranda is a better leader now than he was when the Bears won the Big 12 two years ago. The vision Aranda presented that morning in November has unfolded as he said it would.
“I look back at the plan, where we are now, and he’s done everything he’s said he was gonna do,” Rhoades said.
The West Virginia team that beat Baylor that night finished 9-4 with a coach, Neal Brown, who was in a similar position a year ago but coached his way off the hot seat.
After the loss, Aranda recounted to reporters his postgame conversation. “This sucks for you,” Aranda recalled Brown telling him. “I went through this and it’s way cleansing and you’re gonna come out of this having fun and kicking butt.”
Aranda said he told Brown, “I appreciate that. I kind of feel that way, too. A lot of work to do, though.”
(Photo: Raymond Carlin III / USA Today)
Baylor is betting on Dave Aranda: Can he reward them with a revival?
Baylor should stake a claim in the top tier of the retooled Big 12. But only if Aranda can make this experiment work.
theathletic.com
Baylor’s big Dave Aranda bet: Can another offseason of change save a sputtering program?
By Sam Khan Jr.
7h ago
11
WACO, Texas — Late on the morning of Baylor’s 2023 season finale, while his football team passed time at the Hilton Waco, head coach Dave Aranda was two miles away in his boss’ office, fighting for his job.
Most athletic directors and coaches meet soon after the end of the season to dissect the past and discuss the future. That sit-down is often the moment when underperforming coaches are fired or given another chance.
ADVERTISEMENT
Aranda preferred not to wait. He wanted to make his case for continued employment to AD Mack Rhoades before the Bears’ finale, a 34-31 loss to West Virginia that brought a nightmarish 3-9 season to its merciful conclusion.
Aranda entered Rhoades’ office in Baylor’s Simpson Center carrying a paper-clipped two-page document with notes, bullet points and highlighted text. For the next 90 minutes, he detailed a plan to revive a league-worst defense, retool on offense and alter the program’s roster-building approach. He delivered his vision with an edge and confidence that reminded Rhoades of his initial interview with Aranda four years ago, one day after Aranda had won the national championship as LSU’s defensive coordinator.
Afterward, Rhoades and deputy athletic director Jovan Overshown processed Aranda’s plan. “I left that meeting, and I said this to Jovan: ‘That’s the Dave I know,’” Rhoades said. “I feel pretty dang good that he’s going to be able to execute this.”
Baylor’s 2024 will be a fascinating experiment. Aranda’s hot seat status is unavoidable. Three sub-.500 seasons in four years could have easily justified dismissal last fall. But his one winning season was arguably the best in school history: Big 12 and Sugar Bowl titles and a top-five finish.
Baylor leaders believe in Aranda and love what he represents. They think he’s closer to the championship-winning coach he was in 2021 than the one whose team went a combined 9-16 in ‘22 and ‘23, and they were sold on his vision for a program-wide makeover. Aranda’s hefty buyout, which would have cost Baylor more than $20 million if he’d been fired after last season, also contributed to the decision to bring him back for one more year.
The Big 12 feels as wide open as ever entering its new 16-team era without Oklahoma and Texas. Baylor, with three conference titles in the last 11 years, healthy donor support and pristine facilities, should stake a claim in the top tier of the retooled conference.
But only if Aranda can make this experiment work.
“I need to feel like we’ve regained momentum,” Rhoades said. “I didn’t tell Dave there was a certain amount of games he has to win. I told him, ‘We can’t go 3-9 again.’”
Aranda is 23-25 in four seasons at Baylor. (Chris Jones / USA Today)
For a program that ranks 83rd among FBS teams in all-time winning percentage (.511) according to Winsipedia, it may seem odd that Baylor is a place where high expectations are justified. But the Bears’ recent history tells a different story.
From 2011 to ‘21, Baylor went 90-50 (.642), winning the Big 12 three times and playing for another conference title in 2019. Baylor is tied with Kansas State for the most Big 12 titles of any remaining member of the conference. That stretch spanned three head coaches: Art Briles, Matt Rhule and Aranda.
Briles was fired in 2016 following an investigation into sexual assault allegations against players in his program and his staff’s handling of them. Rhule left after Baylor’s 11-3 Big 12 runner-up season to take the Carolina Panthers job, which led to Aranda’s hiring.
The Bears have invested heavily in their infrastructure: McLane Stadium, which opened in 2014, cost more than $260 million. The Fudge Football Development Center, a new 100,000-square-foot headquarters for the program, will open in July with a $89.6 million price tag. After the 2021 Big 12 title, Aranda signed a contract extension through 2029 to fend off other suitors. Baylor’s future seemed solidified.
The following year, Baylor entered November still in contention for the conference championship game, but the Bears lost four straight to end that season. Their three wins last fall came over Big 12 newcomers Cincinnati and UCF by single digits — the latter requiring a miraculous 28-point comeback — and against Long Island, a 4-7 FCS team. In 2023, no Big 12 team scored fewer points or allowed more than Baylor.
The Bears had one-score losses to Utah, Kansas State, West Virginia and Houston but lost to five other Big 12 opponents by an average of 25.6 points. And, of course, there was the ominous season-opening 42-31 loss to Texas State in which Baylor trailed by double-digits multiple times.
Baylor leadership points to a young roster as a key factor in last year’s struggles. Last season, Baylor led the Big 12 in combined snaps played by freshmen, with more than 4,000, a thousand clear of the team with the next-most, Iowa State. The Bears were last in the conference in snaps played by seniors. By comparison, Baylor’s 2021 Big 12 title team had more than 13,000 combined snaps by seniors and just over 1,000 played by freshmen.
“I don’t think they were as talented as people thought they were,” said an opposing coach, summarizing a popular counterargument from those outside Waco.
Aranda’s plan to revive Baylor starts with returning to a previous version of himself: the defensive whiz who was the nation’s highest-paid assistant when Rhoades hired him away from LSU. Once at Baylor, Aranda tried to evolve from an ace defensive coordinator who happened to be head coach into a program-wide leader. “In years past, he really had his hands on everything,” Overshown said.
As a point of pride, Aranda doesn’t want to go out with a bad defense. Baylor allowed 6.58 yards per play last season. Aranda’s LSU defenses allowed 4.94 in four seasons. He will call that side of the ball this year and commit his time to the unit in a way he hasn’t since his arrival.
“You don’t have the success that he does, you’re not winning national championships without being one of the best defensive minds in the country,” Overshown said. “Let’s bring that here.”
At practice, Aranda is more hands-on than before. During individual drills, Aranda spends his time with the linebackers and position coaches Caleb Collins (outside LBs) and Jamar Chaney (inside LBs). Where the linebackers go, Aranda follows.
To compensate, he must pull back elsewhere. Scaling down his involvement in offensive meetings. Trusting others to handle their business, from position coaches to support staff and recruiting staff.
Pulling back also means fewer off-field obligations. Although he has been available to local reporters for typical post-practice spring football scrums, Aranda has turned down nearly every 1-on-1 interview request this offseason, including one for this story, in favor of spending his time on defense, according to a team spokesperson.
“With him helping at linebacker, on defense and being the head coach, that’s a lot to have on his plate,” receivers coach Dallas Baker said. The way Baker sees it, “I’m the head coach of my own room. So it’s not just on him, it’s on all of us.”
In his pitch to Rhoades and Overshown, Aranda emphasized the need for an offensive coordinator with head coaching experience to assist with the transition. After last season, he parted ways with Jeff Grimes, who revived the offense in 2021, and hired Cal offensive coordinator Jake Spavital, who spent four years as the head coach at Texas State.
Including Spavital, Baylor has six new position coaches. But the program’s most eyebrow-raising addition was Gary Patterson, the former longtime head coach at rival TCU.
Patterson joined the staff as a senior consultant, a role similar to the one he held at Texas in 2022 when he was a special assistant to head coach Steve Sarkisian. During a recent practice, Patterson spent most of his time standing well behind the defense, getting a big-picture view and jotting down notes on a small piece of paper.
Rhoades said hiring Patterson was Aranda’s idea; the coaches had a preexisting relationship. But Rhoades wanted to ensure Patterson’s motives for joining the staff were pure.
“I knew when we announced that a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, he just wants to be the next head coach.’ We had to talk through that,” Rhoades said. “You look at TCU’s track record during his tenure, pretty successful. He’s got a lot of wisdom, seen a lot of different things. I felt like he really wanted to help Dave.”
The expectation is that Patterson will be an asset to the staff not only schematically but also with leadership and other big-picture issues.
“He has found a neat way to kind of quietly navigate amongst the coaches,” Overshown said. “And Dave has a lot of respect for him. … He’s adding perspective and coaching up our coaches and helping Dave as he can. So it’s been really positive.”
Staff changes have been a constant in the Aranda era. He fired three offensive assistants after his first season. He fired his mentor, defensive coordinator Ron Roberts, following 2022. Counting Aranda as a de facto DC, this will be Baylor’s third set of new coordinators in five years. Since 2020, a total of 17 full-time assistant coaches either left for other opportunities, weren’t retained or were dismissed.
So why is this set of staff changes any different? Baylor leadership is betting on Aranda’s return to his schematic roots.
“There is a different persona that’s come about with Dave himself,” Overshown said. “You can see the commitment. You can see the trust in the guys. … There’s a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. You feel the edge. He is truly in the space that made him great.”
Asked if Aranda’s changed, Baker said, “Yes and no. He still doesn’t really yell at the coaches.”
Rhoades puts it more succinctly.
“He’s grumpier,” he said with a smile.
A deflating 42-31 loss to Texas State in Week 1 set the tone for Baylor’s disastrous 2023 campaign. (Raymond Carlin III / USA Today)
If the roster isn’t good enough to win, all that won’t matter. Aranda’s plan to address his talent deficit was threefold: retain the key members of the current roster, hold on to the 2024 recruiting class and find impact players in the transfer portal.
To accomplish those goals, Baylor modernized how it tackled NIL for the football program.
“We had name, image and likeness throughout the program, but it was a base level, everybody (gets) the same across the board,” Rhoades said. “But that’s not the world we’re living in anymore.”
Aranda originally subscribed to that approach to prevent potential locker room issues. He admitted in November that he was one of the reasons Baylor was behind competitively in NIL.
In collaboration with GXG, Baylor’s primary NIL collective, the Bears have ramped up their efforts to retain players and attract transfers. Overshown said NIL funding for football has “doubled” since last year and said GXG is working to ensure that NIL doesn’t stand in the way of Baylor landing or retaining a player.
“Because of what people have given, we can be far more aggressive,” Overshown said.
Rhoades said the Bears kept almost everyone they hoped to on the current roster. Baylor had two decommitments in December, but the majority of the high school recruiting class signed. And the Bears have added a dozen transfers so far, including former Toledo quarterback Dequan Finn and former Texas State receiver Ashtyn Hawkins, who each had decorated careers at their previous stops.
Aranda took only six scholarship transfers in the 2021 and 2022 offseasons combined. In the last two years, Baylor has signed 26. Last year Aranda admitted that his hesitance to use the portal following the Big 12 title run was a mistake. That conservative approach has contributed to the current roster predicament.
Aranda is also casting a wider net in recruiting. Before, he erred heavily on the side of culture fit. “If there’s 10 kids within the state of Texas that are playing football and have the grades to go to college, probably three of them fit at Baylor,” Aranda said in 2022.
The program emphasized “person over player,” which became an oft-used hashtag on Baylor football social media that Aranda worked into the fabric of the program. But two former staffers granted anonymity to discuss the program without permission from their current employers hypothesized that Aranda went too far in that direction when it came to recruiting, overlooking potential impact players with minor issues in the effort to find ones with impeccable character.
Rhoades said he discussed the balance of the roster with Aranda, challenging him on how many players he has who are great culture guys but may be thinner on talent. “If that’s a third of your roster or half of your roster, you’re not talented enough to win games,” Rhoades said. Conversely, taking too many risks in the name of talent is also problematic “because you’re spending all your energy making sure they’re always doing the right stuff.”
Changing gears meant looking at the roster holistically, rather than making sure every player checked every single box in Aranda’s ideal profile. Overshown said “person over player” is still vital to Baylor’s DNA, but the program is more mindful about how it brands itself. Notably, the team’s social media accounts haven’t used the hashtag since December.
“‘Person over player’ doesn’t have to be as forward-facing if it’s who you are,” Overshown said.
Aranda is hoping to duplicate the turnaround of Neal Brown (left), who went from job uncertainty to Big 12 contention in 2023. (Raymond Carlin III / USA Today)
So what must Aranda do to solidify the program and return in 2025?
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Rhoades said. “And there’s so many nuances to it. How hard you’re playing, scores in games, recruiting class. … I need to see an upward trajectory.”
Success is paramount, but leadership is rooting for this experiment to work.
“We want someone like Dave Aranda to succeed in this industry,” Overshown said. “He needs to. And when you speak about Baylor, he is synonymous with who we want to be from a person and character fit.” Rhoades calls him “one of the most genuine people I’ve met.”
Aranda’s introspective nature and willingness to admit shortcomings is refreshing. But his early reluctance to quickly adapt to college football’s ever-changing landscape contributed to Baylor’s current dilemma.
Rhoades said he believes Aranda is a better leader now than he was when the Bears won the Big 12 two years ago. The vision Aranda presented that morning in November has unfolded as he said it would.
“I look back at the plan, where we are now, and he’s done everything he’s said he was gonna do,” Rhoades said.
The West Virginia team that beat Baylor that night finished 9-4 with a coach, Neal Brown, who was in a similar position a year ago but coached his way off the hot seat.
After the loss, Aranda recounted to reporters his postgame conversation. “This sucks for you,” Aranda recalled Brown telling him. “I went through this and it’s way cleansing and you’re gonna come out of this having fun and kicking butt.”
Aranda said he told Brown, “I appreciate that. I kind of feel that way, too. A lot of work to do, though.”
(Photo: Raymond Carlin III / USA Today)
