Re: Baylor needs to hire some good lawyers (Update: Art Briles fired)
Side point as it has been brought up.
I'm not going to argue that Briles is not a skilled offensive mind, but let's be honest: Baylor's ascent to the top of the Big 12 has more to do with how weak the conference is than his pinball offense.
He took over a lousy program and had consecutive 4-8 seasons in 2008 and 2009.
They improved to 7-6 in 2010. How? Wake Forest was replaced on the schedule with Sam Houston State, Kansas replaced Nebraska (who had beaten Baylor in both 08 and 09) on the schedule, and Texas imploded.
Baylor got three more wins merely by virtue of their 'now softer than the last two years schedule.'
In 2011, the drew the TCU team that lost a bunch of seniors after the unbeaten Rose Bowl campaign and the Big 12 was weaker because Nebraska and Colorado had left for other conferences. Texas AGAIN was down. The Bears faced four ranked opponents and went 2-2 against them during a 10-3 campaign. But this WAS a talented and good Baylor team despite some of those advantages and besides - they still had to actually win the games on the field.
Their regression to 8-5 coincided with the loss of RG3 and a MUCH tougher schedule. But they did have one great game, their rout of Kansas State that brought Alabama out of the coffin and into the national title picture just one week after the loss to JF2.
(Speaking of that....did I mention that suddenly ATM was off the schedule in 2012????? A team that beat Baylor by four touchdowns during RG3's Heisman campaign)
So Baylor now has replaced Colorado, Nebraska, Texas A/M and Missouri (who, in fairness, they'd actually beaten starting in 2009) - teams that usually would leave them at 1-3 at best, with TCU and WVA plus cupcakes from out of conference (Wofford, Buffalo, ULM in 2013, for example), Texas regressed so badly they basically fired Mack Brown, and they got an off week right after a cush game against Kansas before playing OU, while the Sooners were slugging it out with a better Texas Tech team (although they, too, had the same time off).
The data is somewhat mixed. Baylor was a talented team in 2014, for example, but their schedule again was suffering from a lack of playing double digit win teams
Furthermore, look at their performance in bowl games, where they don't get to hand pick the opponent:
2010 - blowout loss to Illinois
2011 - beat Washington, 67-56, in a game where both teams didn't even put a defense on the field
2012 - beat UCLA by three TDs
2013 - lost by ten to UCF
2014 - lost to Michigan State in a great game
2015 - beat North Carolina by 11
So during this great run, they're 3-3, their conference got substantially weaker, and they leavened up the early schedule with cupcakes - plus, Texas has not been anything near what they were prior to "Colt getting hurt."
Again, I don't totally dismiss Briles' role in their ascendancy. He clearly was/is the leading figure that masterminded it. But it was also accomplished with smoke and mirrors.
It just looks eerily similar to what made Rich Rodriguez look like a really good coach prior to 2008. (His rise coincided with the Big East losing Miami, Syracuse, and Va Tech......and the notion he had 'laid the wood to the SEC' (as Cowherd said) by going 3-0 against Miss St and UGA; of course, UGA has a long history of laying eggs on the big stage so take that for what it was worth).