What is Matt Rhule's Baylor Legacy?
In December 2016, Matt Rhule took one of the most dreary college football jobs in recent memory. Not yet six years later, he is about to get paid $40 million to not coach the Carolina Panthers.
His time at Temple was legendary, and his time in Carolina was abysmal, but how is he remembered for his three-year stint coaching the Baylor Bears? Well, that’s complicated.
In the history of a football program that has been mostly bad, Rhule is one of the most divisive coaches in Baylor’s history. When he left Waco for Charlotte and a mega contract at the end of a magical 2019 season, most Bears were wishing the door actually would hit him on the way out.
After his firing Monday, the reaction is a little more mixed.
Again, Rhule came to Baylor in late 2016 when the program had turned from national power to dumpster fire almost overnight. The football team, athletic department, and university were being dragged into the national media in the wake of a massive sexual assault scandal where members of the football staff and athletic department had covered up sexual misconduct by players.
The scandal led to the firing of the late university president Ken Starr, athletic director Ian McCaw and the Bears’ head football coach, Art Briles.
No players wanted to go to Baylor. In fact, when Rhule was introduced, the Bears had just one commitment (future All-American Jalen Pitre) and had just become the third team in Division I football history to lose six straight games after winning their first six games of the season.
The wheels were falling off the program and the preacher’s kid who had just turned the Temple Owls into a 10-win team was at the podium saying he wanted to “win the Big 12 championship and the national championship.”
Most Bears fans thought Rhule was in over his head, but he was confident and he said everything fans wanted to hear. That spring, he put it into action, bringing in over 30 recruits, including future All-Big 12 performers like quarterback Charlie Brewer, linebacker Terrel Bernard and running back Trestan Ebner. All the momentum led to a 1-11 season.
Rhule saw Baylor football at its bottom and promptly worked it right back up. In year two, the Bears amazingly went 7-6, winning the Texas Bowl. In year three, Rhule’s scrappy Bears went to the Big 12 championship game and the Sugar Bowl, a shoe-string tackle away from the College Football Playoff.
Dave Aranda might have made it look easy to turn around a team the way he did in 2021, but Rhule started with nothing, and two years after winning ONE game, they were a shoe-string tackle away from the PLAYOFF. Love him or loathe him, Rhule pulled off one of the quickest college football rebuilds the game has ever seen.
There was a soft underbelly to the smooth-talking, ultra-positive, hard hat mentality Rhule personified to the media and fans alike, however.
Former Bears wide receiver Chris Platt, who played under both Briles and Rhule, told a different side of Rhule when he claims the coach told him he wouldn’t let Platt transfer to Houston to play under former Baylor offensive coordinator Kendal Briles, as he told the “Please Bear With Me” podcast in 2021.
When Platt tore his ACL in the 2017 season, he said Rhule did not reach out to him for two weeks after his surgery and that when he did go to cheer on his teammates at a game, his locker had been cleaned out. He also said he was not the only player who felt slighted or even had their careers hindered by Rhule.
Like something out of a Jimmy Swaggart tell-all, it looked like Rhule put up a facade of being a players coach, a guy the team would go to war for, all while some felt they were nothing but a jersey number in the gameday program.
All said, though, the Baylor Bears football program and their fans owe a debt of gratitude for Rhule. All of the success the program saw last year is not possible without him.
Aranda took the team to the next level and will likely continue to do so. Nothing should be taken away from Aranda’s accomplishments, but the veteran leadership of the 2021 team was made up of guys Rhule pried from the depths of obscurity to come play at Baylor when no one wanted to play there.
On paper, Aranda is a better head coach, but there is no way Baylor lands the defensive coordinator of the reigning national champions if Rhule doesn’t raise the profile of that job.
He did not reach the conference championship or national championship heights he envisioned at Baylor, but he left the program much better than he found it and paved the way for the right guy to take the Bears to that next level and lead the way for years to come.
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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.