Should Baylor 'Black Out' McLane Stadium vs. Kansas State?
Baylor Bears fans and coaches have called for a better atmosphere at McLane Stadium for Saturday's titanic matchup with No. 23 Kansas State, but what route will bring the stadium to life? October's gold-out didn't work, the preface of a win-or-go-home game in the Big 12 race doesn't seem to do the trick, so some of Baylor Twitter is calling for a theme we haven't seen at McLane since the 2015 season - a blackout.
The formula seems simple enough, it's Baylor's first home conference night game in two years, black looks great and intimidating when the whole stadium embraces it, and two of the best atmospheres the team has had in the last decade have been a blackout game.
Floyd Casey Stadium was electric for the first blackout against Oklahoma in 2013, a 40-12 beatdown of the Sooners, and the theme brought equal fervor the next year against Kansas State, as the Bears won a top 10 matchup and the Big 12 Championship that night.
So why hasn't Baylor done it since 2015? Well, Art Briles, that's why.
The blackout theme was a Briles brainchild. I mean, any school with a set of black uniforms has tried it, but Briles brought it to Baylor and embraced it as his own. He was so synonymous with the new "tradition", in fact, that the athletic department ditched it after his firing amidst a sexual assault scandal in 2016.
Later that year, in one of the most embarrassing days in the history of the program, the Bears hosted TCU, and a portion of fans, in protest of Briles' dismissal, wore black. Some wore black t-shirts that had #CAB (Coach Art Briles) written on them in support of the shamed coach, and one infamous banner with the same initials hung from a suite inside McLane. The Bears lost by 40 points that day, with each Frog scoring drive like a funeral march away from what the program had built up and straying some fans farther and farther from reality.
So Baylor hasn't had a blackout since. Don't we think it's time we stop letting Briles dictate how we get fans involved in the games?
He doesn't have a statue outside the stadium, the stadium isn't named after him, and nobody is "honoring" him or protesting for his reinstatement. Why not bring this back? By letting fans do the blackout (officially, not just a Twitter movement), isn't that a more powerful statement of "we've moved on from Art Briles" than never doing it ever again?
Everyone has black Baylor gear, everyone looks good in black, and black goes with anything. So why no blackout Saturday? Well, one key issue to this predicament is Baylor doesn't have a black uniform.
In the Briles days, the teams had an all-black alternate uniform and maybe their best combo ever was the black jersey and pants with a chrome gold helmet. Since changing to the mind-numbingly bland set in 2019, the Bears stuck with a gold alternate and ditched black and gray options. So would it look good to have the whole stadium in black but the teams on the field are wearing white and green?
Personally, I'd love to see the blackout games return. They were awesome. I have some awesome black Baylor gear in my closet just begging for such an event, but it's not the same connection as when the Bears were rocking some elite black uniforms on the field. Also, the uniforms were great under Briles and he had nothing to do with it, they are two entirely separate entities.
No one will look back at the film in 20 years and scoff in disgust because Bears fans wore black because Briles liked when they did it. 2016 against TCU? Maybe, that was embarrassing. 2022? No chance.
With every game so vital in the last three weeks of the season and the team needing a distinct home-field advantage, I think fans would wear just about any color to get back to Arlington.
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You can follow Cameron Stuart on Twitter @RealCamStuart
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.