Bowl Game May Salvage Baylor Bears Season
Friday’s 38-27 loss to the Texas Longhorns mercilessly ended the Baylor Bears’ regular season with the same winning percentage they had before taking the field against Albany back on September 3, .500.
Kicking off the season with a #10 preseason ranking and coming off the most successful year in program history, Baylor's 6-6 regular season can only be categorized as a disappointment. Not rock bottom, far from it, despite what some keyboard warriors typed out in a fit of rage and still groggy from a Thanksgiving food coma, but disappointing. No season that ends in a bowl game can be anywhere near rock bottom, and the lucky 13th contest of the year has salvaged Baylor seasons in the recent past.
With the advent of the College Football Playoff in 2014, much has been made of non-New Years Six bowl games being watered down and virtually worthless. From a fan’s point of view, excluding the pampered and spoiled brats that follow the very best and biggest programs in college football, the notion couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The bowl game can make or break a season in a fan’s memory, no matter how the team did the first 12 or 13 games of the year. Take, for example, the Bears’ 2013 and 2014 seasons. Even with back-to-back Big 12 championships, there is still a whiff of unfinished business and a little more to be desired as the Bears faltered on the national stage of the Fiesta Bowl and Cotton Bowl respectively in consecutive losses.
The next season, however, proved what a bowl victory could do for a program’s psyche, if only for a few months. The Bears went into the year with major hype, fielding maybe the most talented team in their history and reaching the No. 2 AP ranking before the wheels fell off. Starting quarterback Seth Russell’s neck injury knocked him out for the season in October and his elite backup Jarrett Stidham followed suit in November. The Bears narrowly missed a Sugar Bowl berth, lost three of their last four, and faced the No. 10 ranked North Carolina Tar Heels without a true quarterback.
With all the vibes around the fan base against them, the Bears upset the Tar Heels, 49-38, thanks to 645 rushing yards, something all Baylor fans still look back on fondly. Some might even be unpleasantly surprised to hear they lost to their three biggest rivals (Oklahoma, TCU and Texas) that season.
The next season, after one of the most tumultuous offseasons any college football team has ever had, the seemingly worthless bowl game salvaged an embarrassing year (well, as much as it could have). The 2016 Bears started 6-0 under interim coach Jim Grobe and became the third team in college football history to lose the next six games after winning the first six, having all but completely given up on their coach and their program. To make matters worse, they were once again pitted against a top 20 team, this time the Boise State Broncos, in the Cactus Bowl.
Instead of more impending disappointment, the Bears put out arguably their best performance of the season as a career day from receiver K.D. Cannon helped them blow out the Broncos, 31-12. Even better, ESPN interviewed newly hired coach Matt Rhule during the broadcast, giving Baylor fans unbound hope after a horrible year.
In 2018, they limped to a 6-6 record after losing two of their last three and watching Texas play in the Sugar Bowl and Oklahoma in the playoff. Instead of cruising in the Texas Bowl, the Bears gave a pseudo-home crowd an unforgettable night full of explosive offense in a 45-38 win over Vanderbilt.
The short answer is, those bowls you say are worthless now actually can save the memory of a season. If you'd asked any Baylor fan what game they remember from the 2015, 2016 or 2018 seasons, we'd venture to say most would talk about the bowl game. This year especially, with youth at so many skill positions that haven’t quite come together, an extra month of practice can not only do wonders for this team but for the 2023 Bears as well.
It might be some corporate name game against a fellow underachieving team in a city no one wants to go travel to and from around Christmas, but by no means is it worthless to these players and to the fans, you just might not realize it yet.
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