Baylor Bears: Huge Opportunity for Transfer Portal QB?
After the Baylor Bears fell to the Texas Longhorns 38-27 on Black Friday to drop their third straight game and fall to 6-6 on the season, there were few positives to keep a fan warm at night.
Maybe the biggest positive for the future, however, was Baylor's quarterback room.
A month later, the Bears looked lost against a much more solid Air Force team in the Armed Forces Bowl. After Bears quarterback Kyron Drones entered the transfer portal and prized quarterback recruit Austin Novosad flipped his commitment to Oregon at the 11th hour, all Baylor fans have a quarterback on their Christmas list.
That quarterback's name is unknown and his fit is undefined, but maybe the gross uncertainty of the program's future at the position is the very buoy Dave Aranda and his coaches will use to reel in a signal caller from the transfer portal.
While recent performances may not say so, sophomore quarterback Blake Shapen still has some promise, but it is obviously fading fast. It is this writer's opinion that part of the Bears' struggles this year came from such an emotional and mental letdown from the players and the coaching staff when they realized the lack of production they had at the quarterback position.
With no scholarship quarterbacks on the roster to back up Shapen next season, Waco should be a hot destination for transfer portal passers who didn't find the right landing spot in the initial surge of the cycle.
No matter what you think of this season, the offensive scheme, or the offensive coordinator, Baylor plays in a relatively open conference (three champions in the last three years with a national power on the way out), and very few of those programs can offer a chance at the starting quarterback job this spring.
You don't think Hudson Card or Grayson McCall saw Thursday's performance in the bowl game and thought they couldn't be the starting quarterback at Baylor next season? They might have been blowing up Aranda's phone during the second quarter.
These portal players aren't dumb, and they saw what the Baylor program did in 2021. Some first hand like former Ole Miss Rebel Luke Altmyer, who is still in the transfer portal. They see this program can win at the highest level and, obviously, one of the biggest missing pieces at the moment is an all-conference caliber quarterback.
Maybe Baylor doesn't bring in the big, flashy starter whose name every college football fan knows at this point. Maybe it's not Card or McCall or Virginia's Brennan Armstrong or Clemson's DJ Uiagalelei that comes through the door, but Baylor is an absolute gold mine destination for a quarterback hungry to get national attention.
Maybe the Bears coaching staff leans exclusively towards experience rather than raw skill and looks at Austin Aune from North Texas or Jack Plummer from Cal, but either way, there is suddenly some hope to be a quarterback destination. Even if it's for the most painful reasons possible.
Have y'all heard the one about the rainbow after the flood? Baylor might just be a lot closer to a rainbow than most fans think.
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Covering Baylor for Inside The Bears and the Locked on Baylor podcast. You can follow me for more Baylor content at @realcamstuart on Twitter. Originally from Rockland, Massachusetts and a Baylor alum, so I might mix the occasional bias and/or Boston sports tweet in there every once in a while.