Bailiff embraced tough job at tiny school and made it work
End likely near for coach, but he’s remembered by people he touched
On Aug. 27, 2014, David Bailiff called a nervous, firsttime dad who was holding his son in a room at the Woman’s Hospital of Texas.
“Need a count,” Bailiff, the football coach at Rice, said. “How many fingers?” “Ten.” “How many toes?” “Ten.” “Scholarship letter is in the mail,” Bailiff said.
True to his word, an envelope, with a makebelieve scholarship letter for the class of 2032, was in my mailbox a few days later.
Bailiff might not have known “the Rice way” when he arrived on South Main in 2007, but it didn’t take him long to learn. For 11 seasons, he’s embraced a job at a tiny private school and found a way to win with tougher-than-normal admissions standards and limited resources.
Now that time has likely come to an end.
Bailiff, one of the longest-tenured football coaches in school history, walked off the Rice Stadium field for probably the last time Saturday after a 30-14 loss to North Texas. At 1-11, the Owls suffered their worst season in nearly three decades.
“It’s hard,” said Bailiff, pausing as he fought back tears. “These seasons are tough. Tough on your soul.
“It’s consuming. Everything you do is about trying to figure out a way to crawl out of where we are and get a win.”
In the end it was too few wins, a steady decline from 8-5 in 2014 to 5-7 to 3-9 to 1-11 the last three seasons, that will cost Bailiff his job. He will meet with athletic director Joe Karlgaard on Monday but acknowledged his future at the school “is probably not good.”
Bailiff has one year remaining on his contract.
If this was Bailiff ’s final game, he ended it just the way he’s done the others.
There was the customary handshake with North Texas coach Seth Littrell near midfield. Then he stood near the 30-yard line in front of the Marching Owl Band, put both hands in the air to make the Owls sign and fought back emotion behind his sunglasses during school song.
A fan approached from behind to drape a Rice flag across Bailiff ’s shoulders. A few fans yelled words of support.
A woman in the stadium elevator did not plan to come to Saturday’s game at Rice Stadium but changed her mind, “because I wanted to be here for coach.”
Later, Bailiff, 59, fought back emotions on several occasions, as he discussed a season ravaged by injuries to 14 starters. How his players never lost hope, “an absolute tribute to the type of character and resiliency where they never quit” through the program’s worst season since going 0-10 in 1988.
How he was eager to get back to the locker room and be with his players, including 19 seniors, “that are upset … I want them to know how much I love them.”
How he would go to Methodist Hospital to check on running back Sam Stewart, who was taken by ambulance after suffering an apparent head and neck injury in the second quarter.
Even through the ups and downs, through personal losses after he lost both parents within a year of each other but kept coaching, Bailiff never changed. Or lost his sense of humor.
He never publicly criticized his players, even when calls for his firing intensified. After a particularly embarrassing loss to Nicholls State, a Football Championship Subdivision school, in his debut, Bailiff joked that “people were probably asking, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”
Told one day after a practice several years ago there was a newspaper poll asking if he should be on the hot seat, Bailiff said: “I guess my wife and children haven’t voted enough.”
Led by the highpowered offense of Chase Clement, Jarett Dillard and James Casey, Year 2 produced a 10-win season and Texas Bowl victory — the school’s first bowl win since the Dickey Meagleled Owls beat Alabama in the 1954 Cotton Bowl.
That was followed by three straight losing seasons before Bailiff led the Owls to the best three-year stretch in the program’s 106-year history. Rice won 25 games during that span, claimed the Conference USA title in 2013 and went to three straight bowls.
“He showed you can win a championship at Rice,” one longtime supporter said Saturday.
After winning the C-USA West title, Bailiff joked he hadn’t heard from anybody famous. Three days later, he had a missed phone call from former President George H.W. Bush.
Through the years, Bailiff became a beloved figure on campus. When recruit David Wilganowski collapsed at a high school game due to a heart condition that forced him to quit football, Bailiff honored his scholarship and made him a student assistant. He established an ‘honor jersey’ that allows current players to pay tribute to some of the greatest Owls players.
He once drove more than three hours to watch Rice tennis star Natalie Beazant in the NCAA singles tournament.
All while the Owls annually have one of the highest graduation rates in the nation.
“You spend 11 years invested in a place that’s got wonderful people. I’ve made lifelong friends here,” said Bailiff, who is 57-80 at Rice. “I want Rice to win in all sports.
“We went to three straight bowls and now three years we haven’t. We just didn’t get it done.”