A big rebound for Baylor basketball
Sports ‘renaissance’ peaking with Bears atop AP hoops poll, Lady Bears No. 2
WACO — After springing into the Ferrell Center interview room Thursday, perpetually upbeat Baylor coach Scott Drew crankstarted his own news conference with a question.
“Still raining outside?”
Drew had been submerged in preparing his top-ranked Bears (24-1) for a ballyhooed home game against No. 3 Kansas (23-3) on Saturday morning, and he hadn’t poked his head outside the arena in a while.
The answer was the same as what’s happened in the past year with Baylor athletics:
The ominous clouds had scooted on, and sunshine poured along the banks of the Brazos River, boosting the glare off what’s become the most successful college athletic department in the state.
“This whole year, from volleyball to women’s basketball, football, up and down the list,” said Drew, in his 17th season in Waco. “It starts with our administration, and the student-athletes all feed off each other. They see the success another team is having, and they want to have that same success. They see
how hard another team is working, and they want to work that hard.
“Iron sharpens iron.” Nearly four years after Baylor fired football coach Art Briles in the midst of a sexual assault scandal, the university and athletic department have emerged from the other side seemingly stronger than ever.
“I would hope so,” said Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades, hired in the summer of 2016 to clean up the huge mess left behind by Briles, who enjoyed plenty of success on the field. “If we don’t learn from our mistakes, as individuals and organizations, we’re never going to grow, and we’re never going to get better.
“We can be better, and should be better, because of things that happened in the past.”
Drew and women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey, with a combined 37 years of head coaching at Baylor, have stayed strong all along. Mulkey this week became the fastest Division I coach, in men’s or women’s basketball, to reach 600 victories. Her overall mark is 600-100.
The Lady Bears (24-1) have won three national titles under Mulkey, including last season, and are currently ranked second behind South Carolina.
“Coaches are only as good as their players. That’s the God’s truth,” Mulkey said in Lubbock after win No. 600.
Drew is acutely aware of that, and he praised his players after they won a Big 12-record 23rd straight game Tuesday, beating Oklahoma 65-54.
“You know how hard it is to accomplish what the team has accomplished,” Drew said. “At the same time, this group has stayed humble and stayed hungry.”
Every time the Sooners tried closing the gap against the visiting Bears, Baylor simply tightened up defensively to earn its 23rd consecutive victory, snapping the mark set by Kansas in 1997 under Roy Williams.
“They are five guys who (play) very much together and are very connected defensively,” OU coach Lon Kruger said of the Bears, led by dynamic guard Jared Butler. “They play with great awareness.”
Like Drew’s enduring disposition, these are perpetually sunny times in McLennan
County, thanks in part to the football team’s rebound from the scandal that cost Briles and thenathletic director Ian McCaw their jobs.
The Bears finished 11-3 last season and No. 13 nationally, a dozen spots higher than the state’s only other top-25 finisher, Big 12 rival Texas.
Coach Matt Rhule, who rebuilt the program after Briles’ exit, left in January for a job with the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. Baylor replaced him with Dave Aranda, the LSU defensive coordinator who helped lead the Tigers to a 15-0 record and the national title.
“Why Baylor? That was an easy answer for me,” Aranda said of coaching at the nation’s largest Baptist university. “To have the opportunity to coach with your Christian faith out front was a big pull. … I can coach from the heart alongside kids who have their hearts wide open.”
It helped that Aranda will recruit to one of the most unique settings in the nation. McLane Stadium, which opened in 2014, is built alongside a wide portion of the Brazos River, and on game days boats pull up to the campus.
“It’s one of the top five settings in the country of any college athletics venue,” said Rhoades, a former University of Houston and Missouri athletic director. “It’s spectacular and a credit to those before me who planned the stadium and put it on the river and how all of that area has been developed. It’s just a really cool setting.”
About the same time the Baylor football team was wrapping up the best regular season of any team in Texas in 2019, the Baylor volleyball team made its first Final Four in program history.
All of this sudden sports success has Sammy Citrano III smiling widely.
“Think of where we were four years ago,” said Citrano, owner of George’s, one of the town’s most popular
restaurants and watering holes. “It’s a great time to be a Baylor Bear. Winning brings people out — they want to get together to eat and talk about it. And they come out before games and after games. It’s just great business for everybody.
“There’s so much positivity in this community, and everybody’s wanting to jump back on the bandwagon. When coach Briles left, everybody thought we’d be down for a long time. But it’s definitely come back, bigger and better than ever.”
Added Jason Cook, Baylor’s chief marketing officer: “Baylor is in a renaissance.”
For the past decade, Waco has been best known nationally as the home of Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper.” Their Magnolia Silos in downtown Waco is a huge draw.
“So much of what’s going on in Waco is related to Chip and Joanna and bringing 30,000 people a week here,” Citrano said. “There are 11 hotels under construction, and if we can get the road work on (I-35) taken care of in the next three years, we’ll be OK.”
Added a grinning Aranda at his introductory news conference, “If we can have half the success Chip and Joanna have had in Waco, we’ll be all right.”
The talk of the town this week, however, is the success of the men’s basketball team and Saturday’s 11 a.m. home game against perennial power Kansas. ESPN’s College GameDay will be on hand, and it will mark the first time GameDay has visited the same school in football and basketball in an academic year since 2015-16 at Michigan State.
“It doesn’t get any bigger than that,” Drew said.
The Bears have been No. 1 in the Associated Press poll for five consecutive weeks, the longest streak by a team from Texas since Houston was No. 1 for the final eight weeks of 1968. But after the Bears defeated Oklahoma, the players simply shook hands and smiled — and saved any big celebrations for down the road.
While Baylor has made two Elite Eights under Drew (2010 and 2012), it hasn’t made a Final Four since 1950 and never has won a national title.
“At the end of the day,” Drew said, “the biggest celebration is supposed to be at the end of the year.”