7 Years of Dave Aranda: The Good, The Bad, The Lasting Damage
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Dave Aranda has been fired after six full seasons with the Bears. No question, it is a step in the right direction for Baylor football, but right now, it is painful for everyone involved. The damage has been done to this season and beyond.
Before getting into all of the ugly, let's zoom out and look at some of the success Aranda had:
The good
After debuting with a 2-7 record in 2020, Aranda was able to lead the Bears to the best season in program history, going 12-2, winning the Big 12 Championship and the Sugar Bowl.
The following four and a half seasons of subpar football should never take away from what his team was able to accomplish in 2021. His name will forever be associated with the Bears' second Big 12 championship.
In 2024, Aranda led the Bears to an 8-5 season after being projected to finish 12th in the conference. With his job on the line, he won six straight games in the middle of the season to bring the Bears back into Big 12 relevance.
The Bad
Unfortunately, there is much more bad than there is good when it comes to Aranda's tenure.
Here is a short list: 1-6 against rival TCU, 26-32 in the Big 12, hasn't beaten a ranked team since 2022, burned through a carousel of four sets of coordinators, and choked in countless games the Bears needed to win.
Aranda inherited a respected team and program assembled by Art Briles and Matt Rhule; in the matter of six seasons, Aranda squandered all of it. He clearly did not know how to properly navigate the NIL, failing to put together a balanced team on both sides of the ball.
The 3-9 2023 season should have been the breaking point for Aranda; he posted back-to-back losing seasons after 2021 despite having a talented roster. For whatever reason, Baylor just couldn't let him go.
The Lasting Damage
If only Baylor could leave the wreckage of Dave Aranda in the past, but it can't.
Perhaps the greatest damage Aranda has done to this program is ushering in a mentality of mediocrity. From 2010 to 2021, Baylor was a prominent football program in the country, being ranked 95 different weeks, winning was the expectation.
Since then, Baylor has been ranked for only five weeks, all five of which were in a losing 2022 season. Aranda has gone 26-31 during this stretch. There simply isn't an excuse for the fall-off that has done such great damage to a fanbase.
Now, the Bears have to tread through the debris that follows the ugliness of a mid-season firing. The estimated $12 million buyout of Aranda's contract is costly enough, but it will be increasingly hard to attract recruits and transfers into a program that lacks success and lacks a leader.
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Bennett is an undergrad student at Baylor University, studying journalism on the sports track. He is from the DFW area and grew up playing and watching sports, which inspired him to pursue sports writing.
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