Baylor Football Coach on Vegas ‘Short List’ Before Season Starts

The summer sun has been beating down on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas for a few months now. The Texas heat is legendary when it comes to training college athletes for a full fall's worth of football season. I seem to recall Bear Bryant taking some collegiate athletes from Texas A&M on a summer training journey once upon a time.

All the summer conditioning and weight training in the weight room are important for a college program to succeed. There are other important factors that have to be considered too. One of the most important in the big-money world of high-stakes college football is having a respected and well-known head coach.

For the Baylor Bears, the man in charge of the football program is Dave Aranda. We first got to know Coach Aranda from his time at LSU. He was the Defensive Coordinator and the Assistant Head Coach at LSU when the Tigers won their most recent National Championship.

It was Aranda's success with the LSU program that vaulted him into prominence for the Baylor job. The job at Baylor became open when Matt Rhule left the team to become head coach of the Carolina Panthers of the NFL. But how has Aranda fared at Baylor since taking over the program for the Bears?

If you were to ask the Baylor faithful, and Baylor has a lot of faith-loving fans, they would probably tell you that Aranda's 23 wins against 25 losses are not what they were hoping for when he was hired. But believe it or not, Aranda's performance has him listed in the same breath as the head coaches at the University of Florida and the University of Arkansas.

Normally when your football program is being mentioned with SEC powers it's a good thing. But when you consider that Florida and Arkansas haven't been powers in the SEC for a while you know it's not good to be associated with them, at least right now.

The website SportsBetting.ag has put together a list of coaches who are likely to be fired this season. You can actually wager on which coach you think will be the first NCAA Football Coach to be dismissed this season. Currently leading the odds is the University of Florida's Billy Napier. His odds of being first canned are four to one.

The next on the list is Arkansas's Sam Pittman his odds of being first canned are five to one. He's followed by Mario Cristobal of Miami with odds of six to one. Right behind Cristobal is Dave Aranda at Baylor. Aranda's odds of being the first NCAA football coach replaced this year are seven to one.

No, it's not fun to speculate on people losing their jobs unless that person is the coach of the football team you support. Then it's okay, right? I guess we'll have to see how the season or at least the first few games of the season play out.

Baylor should be able to hold serve against Tarleton State when they open the season on August 31st but games against Utah, Air Force, Colorado, and BYU await the Bears in the first five weeks of the season. I think it's safe to surmise that depending on what Baylor's record is by the time they face BYU will determine whether or not the oddsmakers were correct, don't you think?