Final: Okie State, A Bunch — Baylor, Not Nearly Enough

Going into today, the lineup for the Fox Business Channel from 2:30 PM central on went: paid programming about Humana Medicare Advantage plans, paid programming about quitting smoking, paid programming about dash cameras, paid programming about air fryers, and something with Tony Bennett and Perry Como (who died in 2001). “The Journal Editorial Report” with someone named Paul Gigot was slated to start after that followed by “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

In hindsight, after the opening 10-12 minutes of Baylor-OSU, that lineup would have been better viewing in about every possible way. Baylor went up 7-0 with an opening drive that looked like everything we’ve been told to expect from a Matt Rhule team. We ran the ball well with John Lovett and Terence Williams and threw it enough when we needed to. It wasn’t the frenetic, hyper-aggressive beauty of what we had before, but it was gorgeous in its own way. Then Oklahoma State went on a 35-3 run to just about make that meaningless. To put things in perspective, the next bright spot for Baylor came on OSU’s opening drive in the second half, where Grayland Arnold got beat for 50+ yards before recovering to force a fumble. It was success born of failure, hopefully a harbinger of the future for a team that is now 0-6. OSU scored another 24 points after that and probably could have had more.

Six years in now to ODB’s existence, I’m pretty fairly known as someone that tries to find the best in situation involving this team, aka a “sunshine pumper” in the parlance of CFB. I’ve talked repeatedly about trusting the process this season, even as we lost to Liberty and UTSA. I’m having trouble doing both in the immediate aftermath of this one, even though I knew going into it that we would almost certainly lose by a lot of points to a team that is really good. Sometimes it’s not so much that something happens as how. And the how today was really bad.

The last few weeks we’ve looked like a team that hadn’t won but was on the verge of figuring out how. Today we looked like a team that hadn’t won and might not for a good long while. We were mostly bad on offense, spectacularly horrendous on defense (OSU passed 700 total yards with 7 minutes left in the game), and decent only on special teams because Connor Martin is a national treasure. We couldn’t block to protect Zach Smith, tackle to stop Justice Hill, or execute basic coverages to prevent Mason Rudolph and James Washington from carving us up. I can’t think of a single thing we did well on defense, and that’s supposed to be our staff’s strength. We might as well not have safeties.

Whatever, I’ll get over it. It’s not like being a fan of Baylor Football has always been rainbows and unicorns. I guess I just expected that even though success would be a process, and that Rome would not be rebuilt in a day, we’d have more than a few glimpses of an architectural plan half a season in. Maybe the foundation stones have been laid beneath the ever-recurring rubble, but they’re difficult to see. We are bad.

The Bears are now 0-6 with West Virginia coming to town next Saturday night for Homecoming. Should be a fun day, at least.