Some stories are short and sweet. Others are short and sour. This one is the latter if you’re a Baylor Bear fan, but it’s loaded with derisive guffaws for everyone else. I remember thinking to myself when I first learned of it in the Sunday morning next day football game report in the sports pages of the Houston Chronicle: “How can anyone be so stupid?”
Then I remembered the power of greed and its inevitable effect upon the ambition of ego-based human endeavor.
Back in the 1990s, the ever-struggling Baylor University football program hired a fellow named Kevin Steele to lead them out of the wilderness of their growing reputation as a perennial loser. Steele arrived on campus with a determined smile that matched his name as he dropped all the right words on the Baylor populace about his plans for the Bears’ gridiron redemption.
Talk is good. Talk is cheap.
In their second game of Steele’s first season as head coach at Baylor, the Bears led UNLV at home by 24-20 with 12 seconds left in the game. The Bears had the ball on the UNLV one yard line and only needed to take a knee on the next play end the game and seal the victory. UNLV had no time outs remaining and were powerless to do anything that wasn’t handed to them.
Steele decided against taking a knee. He had his offense run the play in pursuit of a TD, hoping, as he later explained, “to create attitude” among his Baylor players.
Well, Steele created attitude all right – even if it was only a reenforcement of the already present “we are losers” football mantle that Baylor folks had been hoping to shed with their new coach’s help.
Baylor fumbled the ball trying to score on the last play of the game at their opponent’s goal line. It was picked by a UNLV speedster defensive back who promptly ran it all the way in reverse for a 99-yard touchdown scamper to end the game as a 27-24 UNLV win.
Kevin Steele lasted four seasons at Baylor (1999-2002), finishing with a record of 9-36 overall and only 1-31 against Big 12 opponents. Too bad for Baylor that they couldn’t have recognized the call in his second game as a harbinger of things to come. Although I suppose contractual factors would have spread out his head coach tenure longer than most Baylor fans would have preferred, the man was just doing what many people do in the face of desperate pressure.
They do something stupid.
Tags: Baylor Bears, Coach Kevin Steele
The Pecan Park Eagle 
November 2, 2011 at 3:07 pm |
There exists somewhere the radio call of the UNLV network when the play happened. The announcers laughed with glee as they described the play. I remember hearing it on one of the sports radio shows the following week.
November 2, 2011 at 4:39 pm |
The title of the email message led me to believe this was the Les Miles biography.
And to boot, check out the audio sometimes as he reflects on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.