Aranda, McGuire, and Why the 'BUTT Bowl' Captures the Imagination
When Joey McGuire took the head coaching job with the Texas Tech Red Raiders last November, he might not have admitted it, but he wanted his new program to look in the mirror and see his old program, the Baylor Bears.
McGuire left Waco after three and a half seasons as the Bears’ associate head coach and right-hand recruiting guru to former head coach Matt Rhule, as he navigated both Rhule and Dave Aranda through the treasure trove that is the Texas high school football recruiting trail.
McGuire was not so secretly the brains behind the “person over player” mantra Rhule preached and Aranda practices. When he left a mega-successful high school coaching career to join Rhule’s staff in 2017, his infectious leadership was a huge help in bringing a program out of the gutter.
Now, he has West Texans eating up his every word (they haven’t had a reason not to, yet) and the staff has something in common - they almost all came from Baylor and they are doing things the Baylor way.
Nearly the whole backroom staff cut their teeth at Baylor, with McGuire notably bringing Director of Football Operations Quintin Jordan and Scouting Director Brian Nance from Waco. He even brought along legendary Baylor coach Grant Teaff’s grandson on his staff as a post-grad recruiting intern.
It might hurt Tech fans’ eardrums to hear McGuire is building Baylor’s culture in Lubbock, but can you blame him? I think this is exactly what Kirby Hocutt wanted and it’s what he is getting. Think about it, McGuire helped bring the Bears out of the mess left behind by the Art Briles tornado and, at the 11th hour of recruiting, built a class of overlooked, two and three-star diamonds in the rough and helped deliver a roster and a culture that led to a Big 12 and Sugar Bowl Championship in 2021.
He was taking players the geniuses at Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M were ignoring and turning them into players who were beating those teams on Saturdays wearing green and gold.
That sounds like a formula that might just work at another program that is seen as a “little brother” in Texas.
Whether McGuire is successful or not in the long term, he will have the great folks of West Texas believing he will be. Heck, the Bears players clamored for McGuire to replace Rhule as head coach before Aranda was hired in early 2020. He has already beaten two ranked (at the time) in-state opponents this year in Houston and Texas and it’s starting to look like teams aren’t doubting the Red Raiders anymore.
With traditional rivals like Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12, where does a rivalry like Baylor and Texas Tech (affectionately called the BUTT Bowl, in honor of the two team’s helmet logos) rank among the conference’s best? Based on their history, it’s tough to say they will be battling for the conference title every year, but it looks like they will be neck and neck with each other no matter where they are in the standings.
This rivalry has maybe more intrigue and overlap than any other game these two play on their respective schedules. Not only is there so much symmetry on the coaching staff and in locker room culture, but Baylor leads the all-time series by the slimmest of margins, holding a 40-39-1 advantage, with both programs sharing a similar insignificant history and fan bases battered by false hope.
With the Bears seeing a program renaissance in the 2010s and here into the 20s, however, Tech fans have to feel they are due for one, too. After all, Baylor saw their rise under shamed head coach Art Briles, a former Tech assistant, and now are beginning a run of sustained success under Aranda, a former Tech grad assistant.
At some point, the Red Raiders will keep the right guy for themselves. Or maybe they just take the right guy from Baylor instead.
BUTT Bowl week can bring the best and worst out of people on Twitter, with constant Waco vs. Lubbock debates, shouts of 1990 - the last time Baylor won in Lubbock or 1955 - the last time the Red Raiders claimed an outright conference title, and the inevitable crutch of a few Tech fans who can’t help but to point out Baylor’s 2016 sexual assault scandal.
While they are two vastly different institutes of higher learning, there seems to have always been a modicum of respect for each other’s football programs, if only because they have so much in common and share the same enemies. Still, the vitriol can fly like tortillas at the Jones on a Saturday night.
One place the nastiness doesn’t seem to hold over (at least, not yet) is between the two coaches. When asked about this matchup, Aranda kept things serious but cordial and even sounded like one of the fans when talking about his old first mate, McGuire.
“I wish them success,” Aranda said. “Just not versus us.”
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