by Baylor University announced that football coach Kevin Steele has been sacked, effective at the end of the seaon. Read about it in the Houston Chronicle.
The fact of the matter is that Baylor has stunk at the game of football for some time now, long before Steele got there, and will continue to be a marginal program for the forseeable future. What is unfortunate is that a fine, well-funded, private institution should be so concerned about winning sports events at all.
Consider what Mack Brown, coach of the Texas Longhorns, had to say about Steele in the article. Baylor can and probably will do much worse in choosing a replacement.
I come from a long line of football fans and have been known to get on my high horse regarding my alma mater’s prospects. However, there’s the sense of an impending lynching in the air at Texas A&M this fall as well. Coach R.C. Slocum’s radical conversion to a run-and-gun offense will not save his job; only wins can do that. Given the pathetic effort the team put forth in Stillwater over the weekend, his goose is nearly cooked.
That said, I don’t believe that R.C. should go. He’s maintained a solid program and while TAMU players are hardly any more deserving of academic respect than those of any other major university football program, at least they are not in court every other week. And consider the man Slocum replaced, Jackie Sherrill. Yeah, he won. But at what cost?
Ultimately, the question is this: what do these schools exist for? To act as a farm system for the NFL? Hardly. It’s long past time that colleges and their alumni look past the win-loss column and treat athletics and coaches with the appropriate perspective.
