Culture
Can Dave Aranda recover from Baylor’s last-second collapse against Colorado?
Nearly three years ago, with a conference title on the line, Baylor’s defense turned into a brick wall.
In the final minute of the 2021 Big 12 Championship Game, Oklahoma State had four tries to get 2 yards and a go-ahead touchdown. The Bears allowed just 1 3/4, and Baylor won the Big 12 crown in coach Dave Aranda’s second season.
On Saturday night at Colorado, Baylor needed another game-sealing stop in the final minute, with lower stakes (the teams’ Big 12 opener) and much more wiggle room: 45 yards to defend and only two seconds for the Buffaloes to cover them. But in a scene reminiscent of the one Kordell Stewart and Michael Westbrook produced 30 years ago, Shedeur Sanders and LaJohntay Wester connected on a miracle Hail Mary to send the game to overtime, where the Buffaloes eventually won 38-31.
Those two endings, 33 months apart, encapsulate how far Baylor has fallen from its peak under Aranda, who’s now 25-27 with the program.
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“The end-of-regulation play is something I’ve never seen,” Aranda told reporters.
That might just be in-the-moment postgame hyperbole, but the Bears executed their defensive plan so poorly that it was reasonable to believe Aranda had never seen a game-winning Hail Mary.
Quarterback Sawyer Robertson and the Baylor Bears are 2-2 after their loss Saturday at Colorado. (Christopher Hanewinckel / Imagn Images)
Once the highest-paid assistant in college football revered for his defensive genius, Aranda entered the season squarely on the hot seat in Year 5 of his first head coaching job, and the Bears’ crushing loss to Colorado feels like a potential turning point. Can he recover?
Since the 2021 season, when Baylor went 12-2 with that Big 12 title and a Sugar Bowl victory, the program is 11-18. The offensive and defensive staffs have turned over, which has been a theme of Aranda’s tenure.
After the program appeared to hit rock bottom with a 3-9 finish last year, Aranda vowed to make more changes, going heavier into the transfer portal, leaning harder into name, image and likeness compensation and installing himself as the defensive play caller for the first time since serving as LSU’s defensive coordinator in 2019.
The first three weeks of the season offered promise. The Bears looked more talented and played with an edge that seemed to be missing last year, and Aranda’s transition to become more hands-on with the defense worked well.
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Even against Colorado, there were encouraging signs. There were eight sacks of Sanders and many more pressures, several of which came from Texas Tech transfer Steve Linton. There were great offensive plays from quarterback Sawyer Robertson and receivers Monaray Baldwin and Hal Presley. There was a general look of competence throughout the team that didn’t often exist a year ago.
But how Baylor lost Saturday was embarrassing. The Bears gave up a 24-10 lead, and they squandered multiple opportunities to put the game away in regulation.
After back-to-back sacks of Sanders led to a punt on fourth-and-31, Baylor — leading 31-24 with 3:58 left — took over at the Colorado 26 with a chance to take a two-score lead. The Bears ran the ball three times and settled for a 46-yard Isaiah Hankins field goal attempt that sailed wide right with 2:16 left.
On Colorado’s final fourth-quarter drive, Baylor had the Buffaloes backed up, facing a second-and-24 at their own 31 with 55 seconds left. Yet the Bears gave up all those yards on the next three plays, keeping the Buffs alive.
And before Wester’s score-tying catch, Colorado flirted with a game-winner on the previous play, as receiver Will Sheppard dropped a pass from Sanders at the 2 after getting behind Baylor cornerback Caden Jenkins.
On Baylor’s final defensive play of regulation, which Aranda said is called “Victory Cigar,” the Bears pressured Sanders and flushed him from the pocket to his left before he launched the bomb to Wester. Aranda detailed a missed assignment on the pressure, which he said was “inexcusable” considering Baylor called timeout to set up the defense before the play.
“I take full responsibility for that,” he said. “I have to be able to coach that better.”
Baylor fans everywhere nodded in agreement. It might be the Bears’ most painful loss since Sept. 11, 1999. That night, Baylor led UNLV 24-21 and possessed the ball with 20 seconds left and the Rebels out of timeouts. Instead of taking a knee, the Bears ran the ball and fumbled; UNLV returned it for a 100-yard touchdown and a 27-24 win.
This Baylor team, instead of returning home 3-1 with positive momentum, must now recover from the emotional gut punch, with a smaller margin for error in this ultra-competitive conference.
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Colorado forces OT with Hail Mary, beats Baylor in dramatic finish
If Saturday’s loss spawns a losing streak, it will be the third consecutive year of frustration for the Baylor faithful. The upcoming schedule is not forgiving. This weekend Baylor hosts No. 22 BYU, which just dominated Kansas State. Then comes consecutive road games at No. 18 Iowa State and Texas Tech before returning home for No. 20 Oklahoma State to close out October.
If the Bears can’t quickly pick themselves up, Aranda’s seat could be on fire heading into November. Although Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades hasn’t publicly dictated a certain number of wins for Aranda to survive the season, making a bowl is a baseline expectation. That was made a lot harder by squandering Saturday’s game at Folsom Field.
The season is not over, by any means. Baylor (2-2) is just a third of the way through the schedule, and if the Bears can rebound quickly and snag a win over the Cougars, it would go a long way toward moving past Saturday’s nightmare finish. This year’s Big 12 is sure to be unwieldy, with three of the top four teams in the league’s preseason poll having lost their conference openers.
But urgency in flipping the script is paramount. The Big 12 championship season in 2021 is the outlier of the Aranda era. Baylor had losing records in the other three years and is now 13-25 overall combined in every year except 2021. The last time Baylor had consecutive winning seasons was the final two years of the Matt Rhule era (2018 and 2019).
Baylor leadership wants Aranda to succeed. He’s well liked around the building because he comes across as thoughtful and genuine. He’s not the fire-breathing caricature that is often the football coach stereotype. In college coaching, being a nice guy can buy you extra time, and it certainly helped earn Aranda this year, despite declining results.
Whether he gets another depends on how Baylor responds to its latest debacle. The decision won’t be made one way or another because of Saturday’s result. But the way the Bears lost will certainly stick out if there’s any ambiguity about the future when Rhoades weighs the decision at season’s end.
After Saturday’s loss, Aranda said the Bears would try to get their heart back in their body and called the loss “a big wake-up call.”
“I know we’ll respond,” he said. “I know this team. And I know we’ll come out stronger because of this.”
If they’re going to hoist another trophy of any kind under Aranda, they better.
(Top photo: Andrew Wevers / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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