Rhule, Baylor have potential for special year
Matt Rhule already turned down the NFL once, but he had his reasons. For one, he was born and raised in New York, and he knew how to recognize a bum deal when he saw one.
If people thought taking Baylor to football respectability had been a miracle, well, he’d have to defy even greater odds to do it with the Jets. And when that franchise reportedly told him last winter that it wanted to hire him as head coach, but wouldn’t allow him to pick his own coordinators?
“At the end of the day,” Rhule told KRZI radio in Waco in January, “I'm never going to be in an arranged marriage.”
So he stuck with the one he’d chosen for himself, probably not even realizing how much better that decision would look 10 months later. Rhule’s Bears are so far ahead of schedule, Google Maps estimates their time of arrival as yesterday.
Two years after ranking among the worst teams in college football while trying to clean up the mess from one of the sport’s ugliest scandals of the millennium, Baylor is not merely undefeated. Heading into the second weekend of November, Rhule’s team somehow stands as the state of Texas’ best chance at a long-awaited spot in the College Football Playoff, as unlikely as that still might be.
The Texas Longhorns, underachieving yet again after a preseason top 10 ranking, aren’t going to get there. Neither is Texas A&M, still waiting to see some return on its sizeable Jimbo Fisher investment. Last summer, the state’s two flagship programs shared hopes of breakthroughs, and now they’re sharing realizations of their own delusion.
It is true, of course, that both UT and A&M have played tougher schedules than the Bears have, and reality might be coming for Rhule’s team yet. Even if he gets his first career victory over TCU’s Gary Patterson this Saturday, Oklahoma and Texas await the Bears after that.
A clean sweep might be a long shot, but winning just one of those three games would represent another huge step forward for the Bears, who went 1-11 in 2017, Rhule’s first season.
When he took the job, it had all the makings of career selfsabotage. Rhule, now 44, had made a bit of a name for himself by taking Temple from a 2-10 record to a 10-3 mark in his fourth year there, and if he wanted to capitalize on that cachet, he probably could have waited for circumstances more favorable than the ones that awaited him at Baylor.
But he not only accepted the challenge, he immersed himself in it. Having no background in Texas, he hired three in-state high school coaches to join his first staff. Rhule didn’t try to downplay the multiple alleged sexual assaults involving former Baylor players under ousted coach Art Briles, saying, “We’re not running from the past, we’re learning from it.”
Clearly, it takes more than one new football coach for a university to move on from a scandal the size of Baylor’s, but Rhule seemed committed to doing his part. Last winter, after the Bears had improved to 7-6 in his second season, someone offered him an escape route.
The Jets, impressed with a New York native’s proven track record of jumping into seemingly impossible situations and finding a way to win, wanted to give Rhule their head coach job. He interviewed for the position, and multiple media outlets in New York reported the deal was done.
But according to Sports Illustrated and SportsNet New York, Rhule backed out because the Jets refused to let him pick his own staff. Instead, the organization offered to let him choose names from a list of assistants they would provide.
Had they granted him the kind of free rein that every other NFL coaching hire usually gets, Rhule might have left Waco before ever beginning what is turning into a dream season. He might have been gone before getting the chance to sign the extension he inked in September, when the Bears added four years to his current contract to make it run through 2027.
Because Baylor is a private institution and its contracts aren’t subject to open-records laws, it remains unclear how much he’s making, or how much it would cost to buy him out of the deal. But athletic directors and general managers with job openings are sure to find out.
Already, the Orlando Sentinel has mentioned Rhule as a possible candidate to replace fired Florida State coach Willie Taggart. And if the Arizona Cardinals were willing to hire a college coach who couldn’t compete for Big 12 titles at Texas Tech, there might be other NFL teams willing to take a chance on a guy who wins at Baylor.
For now, though, Rhule has the chance for the kind of special month the Bears never have seen. And if he takes care of TCU, then keeps it going against Oklahoma and Texas?
People will be willing to arrange things however he wishes.