Firing Dave Aranda was the right call, and Baylor could have made it a year ago and been righter still. The Kansas loss only decided the date on the press release.
Here's the body of work people keep tiptoeing around. Over seven seasons in Waco, Aranda went 40-40 overall and 26-32 in the Big 12. That's a losing record in conference play for his career. Strip out 2021, when Baylor won the Big 12, took the Sugar Bowl and finished No. 5 in the country, and what's left is one more winning season in six years and a lot of 3-9, 5-7, 6-7 football. A program doesn't get to live off one magical fall forever. That season was real and special, but it was also five years ago.
The four-game winning streak that briefly made Aranda look safe did happen. Then TCU beat Baylor, and Kansas beat Baylor 25-24, with Baylor leading 21-10 after three quarters before a blocked field goal in the final minute handed the Jayhawks their first win over the Bears since 2007. Blowing an 11-point lead over a program that hadn't beaten you in nearly two decades is exactly what a team with this record does. Aranda started the season on the hot seat and opened it with a loss to Auburn. Nobody had to invent a reason.
There's a structural reason this never turned around, too. Aranda was open, almost awkwardly so, about being slow to the money, telling Big 12 media days in 2024, when asked how Baylor's recruiting had picked up, "We're paying players." He churned through coordinators and at one point took over defensive playcalling himself. He never strung together two winning seasons back to back. That tenure plateaued, then sank.
The anger belongs with the people who run Baylor athletics more than it belongs with Aranda or his players. Doug McNamee replaced Mack Rhoades as athletic director last December. Word is the previous regime could have pulled the trigger a year earlier. If the administration believed Aranda was finished, it had an entire offseason to act. Instead it waited, kept him, and in the meantime asked DJ Lagway to transfer in and run the thing.
Lagway just fled a midseason firing at Florida, where Billy Napier got cut loose last fall. He came to Waco for a fresh start and is now living the same script a second time before Halloween. A program sold him stability it had every reason to doubt it could deliver. The record is on the coach. Handing a transfer quarterback his second dead coach in two seasons is on the suits who dithered.
Aranda is one of three Power Four coaches shown the door in a matter of days, alongside Maryland's Mike Locksley and NC State's Dave Doeren, and Baylor owes him a buyout believed to be around $12 million on an extension that ran through 2029. Joe Klanderman takes the interim job, with a trip to UCF on Friday night and a roster nobody prepared for this.
The firing itself is clean. Getting here wasn't, and the people who spent a year pretending otherwise should be squirming.
