Grant Teaff's Baylor Legacy Lives On 30 Years After His Emotional Farewell
When former Baylor head football coach Grant Teaff sits in the luxury suite that bears his name at McLane Stadium, he can’t look down and see a familiar sideline. He can’t conjure up the memories of walking out of that locker room.
He can’t take any credit for the three Big 12 championships drilled into the stadium wall behind the end zone and the recruits who emerge from the door underneath it might not even know who he is.
That shouldn’t bother Teaff, though.
When he looks out into the Bears’ palatial home or tilts his head to the right and sees the glistening athletic facilities, the pristine law school, and all the riverfront expansion on Baylor’s campus in the last two decades, he can afford to crack a deserving smile, knowing full well he had a huge hand in bringing that kind of prestige and reputability to once-forgotten Waco and the little Baptist school that could.
When Teaff got to Baylor in 1972, all they had was a dumpy, cavernous stadium in the center of the city, a good few miles away from the actual campus. He brought with him a rebellious attitude, a fiery passion for the game and something the Baylor Bears football program desperately needed.
“He came in and almost immediately made Baylor respectable,” Baylor play-by-play broadcaster John Morris said. “It was instant credibility for Baylor when Grant Teaff became the head coach.”
Over his 21 years as head coach, Teaff turned the program from the perennial doormat of the Southwest Conference to the league’s champion in just three years' time, the first such title in a half-century, and repeated the feat in 1980. He led the Bears to some of their most famous wins and coached All-Americans like Mike Singletary, the Hall of Fame linebacker who was elected the conference’s Player of the Decade for the 1980s, and brought a new swagger to the program they never before had the fortune to strut.
Those two decades of memories were playing in his head as he led the Bears out of the tunnel at Floyd Casey Stadium on November 21, 1992, for his final home game, a crucial matchup with the Texas Longhorns.
How fitting it was for Teaff’s final home game to be against the Longhorns, his most cherished and revered rival.
Baylor’s history with the Longhorns before, during and after Teaff’s tenure so beautifully illustrates his effect on the program and its bravado. Teaff is the only coach in program history with double-digit wins against Texas and refused to believe what everyone else around the university believed, that the Bears would always live in the burnt orange shadow of the behemoth 90 miles to the south, and should be so honored to even participate on the same field as the mighty Longhorns.
Teaff believed that notion was no different than what the guys walking behind Bevo himself had to shovel.
“I never had any fear of Texas,” Teaff said, 30 years after he hung up his headset. “I just really liked to beat them.”
Teaff remembers fondly of the first time he admitted he had no fear of the Longhorns. He was an assistant with the Texas Tech Red Raiders in the late 1960s and was tasked with scouting Darrell K. Royal's dynastic Longhorns and their famed wishbone offense in person. When he came back to Lubbock, he told his colleagues he found holes he knew the Raiders could exploit and fully expected to beat Texas.
“I remember they kind of laughed at me,” Teaff said. “When I told them I was serious, they said ‘we don’t beat Texas.’”
Teaff had a special way of getting his players ready to play Texas, from his rookie year in 1972 all the way to what could have been his final ever game week in 1992. His dual-threat quarterback and current Baylor football radio analyst J.J. Joe remembers it with a smile and a twinge of trauma.
“Whenever we played Texas, Coach Teaff would put their fight song on loop all week at practice, from Monday on,” Joe said. “I swear I know that song better than our own fight song.”
“I wanted to take the players’ fear away,” Teaff remembers. “No longer was UT impossible to beat.”
The Bears were going to need to beat Texas on this cold, wet November Saturday if they were going to give Teaff one more game to prepare for. The team knew from the beginning of the season that this year would be their coach’s swan song and, at 5-5 going into the regular season finale, they knew they needed a win to give Teaff a bowl game and not spoil their own party. Even with a lifetime of being an expert motivator, Teaff didn’t need to say anything for his team to know what was at stake.
“It was already UT week, and we knew what was riding on it,” Joe said. “A lot of the seniors were the ones saying ‘let’s let this be coach’s last game, we don’t want UT to end his career.”
Joe and his teammates played like a team who knew exactly what was at stake, jumping to a commanding 21-10 lead after Joe scampered into the end zone for his second touchdown of the day on the first drive of the fourth quarter. It seemed like even Baylor’s lead, however, wouldn’t last forever in the cold November rain, as the Horns scored twice to cut the lead to a single point with eight minutes to go.
“There was some nervousness there, for sure,” Morris said on the atmosphere inside Floyd Casey. “Everyone wanted to win for Coach Teaff so much, you could feel it.”
With less than two minutes on the clock, the Horns faced a 4th and 4 from the Baylor 41-yard line on a potential game-winning drive. First-year head coach John Mackovic had no choice, he kept his offense out on the field. Needing four yards to keep the comeback rolling, they handed off to running back Phil Brown, who was met by defensive back Trooper Taylor and defensive end Joseph Asbell.
The answer to how far he ran is up to who you ask. Mackovic and the Texas sideline swear he went four and a half yards. Teaff and the officials say he went three and a half.
“Texas always seemed to get the breaks,” Morris said. “On that one, Baylor got the break.”
Moments after Joe and the offense ran out the clock and after Teaff’s feet touched the ground (literally, but maybe not figuratively) following a brief ride on his players’ shoulders, the old ball coach went to the stands full of rabid fans and summoned for his biggest supporters to come onto the field.
Funny enough, the scene is a lot like the one Teaff walked into on a Saturday afternoon before a Baylor game against TCU in similar weather to that day in 1992. He walks into the suite and is warmly embraced by family and friends who only know him as “dad” or “grandpa” or simply “old pal.” He lets the ladies in first like he always does, he walks into the suite like Norm Peterson walking into Cheers, but his wisecrack is “ok, let’s get the party started now!”
Back in 1992, Teaff calls down his wife Donnell, his three daughters, and the rest of his family and starts the party. He and his closest fans take one final victory lap around the home field of the program he resurrected as the fans cheered and the tears build up in the eyelids of the grizzled football coach.
“Of course, it was emotional,” Teaff said. “It was special to have [my family] with me and it was a special time.”
The Bears delivered for their coach against the team he promised to erase the shadow of two decades earlier. Not even the master of the pre-game speech could orchestrate a story so fitting.
“It was such a big deal when Baylor beat Texas because before Coach Teaff, that didn’t happen very often,” Morris said. “Winning that last game and doing it over Texas, that was just perfect.”
“I just really felt like we got him another one,” Joe said. “That was really special.”
On New Year’s Eve, Teaff and his Bears took the field for “another one,” the John Hancock (Sun) Bowl in El Paso against the Arizona Wildcats, erasing a two-score deficit to pull the 20-15 upset victory. So went Teaff’s legendary Baylor career. It didn’t end with a conference championship or a Cotton Bowl win or anything they’d write books about, but it was fit for the man whose effort and passion took the Bears to prominence.
“For me, that year was probably the most rewarding,” Joe said. “We got about every ounce out of that team we could and it was just really great to send him out that way.”
Teaff’s coaching career ended that chilly day in the Sun Bowl Stadium, but his legacy still rings at Baylor as loudly as the bells inside Pat Neff Hall at the center of campus. A statue depicting Teaff outside McLane Stadium highlights not only his meta contributions to the football program but also the concrete ones like, say, his 10 wins over the Texas Longhorns.
The statue in Grant Teaff Plaza outside McLane Stadium.
Without Teaff’s 21-year reign bringing credibility to the program, you can rest assured there would be no McLane Stadium, no Heisman Trophy, and no intoxicating heights the university and the football team have enjoyed over the last decade. It all kind of makes Teaff sounds like another great leader.
“He’s kind of like Moses in a sense,” Joe said. “He didn’t get to go to the promised land, but you wouldn’t have gotten there without him.”
30 years later, Grant Teaff’s legacy is sprinkled all over Baylor and its football program, and his commandments of respect, accountability, and genuine love for the person more so than the player are the pillars that still provide the program’s foundation.
This week, the Bears will take the field in Austin against the Longhorns without fear. They may not win the game, but they will not have lost it before it kicks off, like they would have for so many decades in the 20th century.
You can thank Grant Teaff for that.
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