It's easy in retrospect to see why Baylor wanted to build a winner. The most wins Baylor had in the modern era of football (post WWII) was 10 wins in 1980 and a few token split SWC titles. Baylor joined the Big 12 in 1996 promptly started an abysmal fourteen year run below .500 until Art Briles got them to a bowl game in the fall of 2010 in year three of his tenure.
The events of spring 2010 are why I feel Baylor is where they are at and it's sort of laid and here, & here .Baylor in 2010 was on the cusp of being left out of major college athletics. A religiously affiliated university with horrible football, dreadful attendance (TARP) and stained with the Bliss scandal wasn't going to be at the playing table anymore. The league survived that death rattle and it's my firm believe that the powers-at-be made a conscience effort going forward to drastically alter their future fortunes no matter what.
In 2011 Briles and Baylor rode RG3 to a Heisman trophy, in 2012 they started recruiting in a manner that would eventually be their undoing They over-compensated. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars to bulldoze their rathole of a stadium to build a new one. They had to do everyone thing possible to avoid being left out when the next consolidation occurs. The linked articles above illustrate the win at any cost attitude that invaded their administration during this period. They won. They turned their backs on both minor and major offences on their way to Back To Back Big 12 trophies in '13 and '14. They opened a 250 million dollar stadium in 2014, but the summer of 2015 saw the "bad dudes" that Briles brought to campus in the previous two years making news for their crimes. The most successful years of the Briles regime was built on the back of administrative cover up and extremely gross win at any cost narrative from the top down.
The end goal for Baylor was to secure its future in college athletics, I have no doubt of that the win first narrative sprung for the spring 2010 realignment dustup. The timeline of problem kids taken into that program grew substantially in the immediate 24 months following that realignment scare and administrative cover continued to ensure a winner until the Spring of 2016 when this all blew up.
