I don't think any of those involved (Linda, the BoR, and our Big Money Boosters) want to publicly dredge up all the muck of the Mack era on this site...so we're never going to know all the gory details of what went wrong.

But the tea leaves and bird guts all suggest that many of the BMB folks whom Mack had reportedly turned off by oozing condescension, among other things...many of those folks are in fact friendly with Doug and/or have pleasant memories of him.

In this NIL era we're living in, BMB support is absolutely a necessary component for championship level success. We've seen across the nation that big booster NIL support is a necessary, but not a sufficient component of championship level success.

For that level of success you need both the money to build out the roster, and a staff who can coach them to a title. If you have both of those, you're all but guaranteed to garner the fan support that goes along with the whole thing - as the wins stack up so will the season ticket waiting list.

So I get it. Just hiring Doug, and he in turn rallying our biggest boosters doesn't seem like enough to turn things around when you don't believe in our Head Coach.

Let me be clear: they can fire Dave today and I'll still be proudly bleeding Green & Gold. A lot of y'all seem to grossly misunderstand my loyalties: they're not to Dave or Linda or the BoR*. My loyalty is to Baylor. Full stop.

The flipside of that is that I'll be as happy as anyone if Doug can get Dave '21 levels of support and we're winning at elite levels. In short:

• If Dave has a successful season in 2026, Hell Yeah!
• If he's flopping - let's move the hell on, ASAP.

I think what most of y'all fear is the murky midpoint of all that-- 7-5 or so --wherein we tread the waters of mediocrity. I get your fear, I really do. But I truly believe Doug's hiring is a sign that Linda and the BoR have realized how poor fan engagement had gotten under Mack.

When I say "fans", I mean the whole dang range from top to bottom to tangential: BMBs to causal fan alumni to sports fan residents of the Heart of Texas who just enjoy watching great teams. Doug really seems to understand how the whole fan base has felt ignored and left behind.

Let's give him a chance to make things right on the field and in the stands. For football, that will take patience on our part - the offseason just started! - but Doug didn't create the mess he inherited, so a little grace here is warranted if you ask me. I for, one, am interested to what the holiday season holds in store for Baylor athletics!

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*I do genuinely think Dave's a Good Dude and I'm quirky myself; so if he works out I'll be ecstatic. But if he's retained in mediocrity i'll be surprised and very disappointed.

CorsicanaBear said:

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Fan engagement had gotten poor because winning has gotten poor. Win and the fans engage themselves. Lose and there is nothing you can do to engage them.

Fan engagement is a myth sold to losers.

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Winning is the biggest source of fan engagement?!? NO WAY, BRO!?!

I literally discussed this in the original post, so I assume you included the 1st paragraph as justification for your depressing final sentence. Sad!

But maybe I'm being too harsh above, maybe we have very different understandings of "fan engagement."

So let me be clear: while winning is well established as the primary source of fan engagement, "Game Day Experience" is another major part of how fans make memories and form attachments to a team. GDE encompasses all sorts of things inside and outside of the stadium, but obviously tailgating is a fundamental pillar of GDE.

So for example: I attended over half the Dallas Cowboys' home games from the early-mid eighties (as a small kid) through the early-mid aughts (as a Baylor student) and those experiences where the structural steel of my football fandom.

That period obviously included their glory years, and I got to go to many of the seminal games of that period--I was at both games against the Niners in '92. There's no doubt that the 'Boys becoming the pinnacle of excellence during the golden age of my childhood helped cement my love of football (just like so many younger Baylor fans and the Briles era).

But I also saw Danny White throw the football ****ing BACKWARDS while attempting a forward pass, and I saw firsthand the post-Switzer slow descent into post-season hell. The throughline in all those years was the amazing tailgates I got to be a part of...and honestly the best tailgating was well after the glory years*. It's true that Jerry killed most of the tailgating scene at Texas Stadium...but while it existed, it was GLORIOUS.

So when I gave your final sentence the Trumpian judgement of "Sad!" I mean that very honestly: if you've never had a series of GDEs so memorable and amazing that *despite your team being bad* you still have great memories of those game days through the bad times, well...

...I mean this honestly: that's really sad as a sports fan. Legit, that sucks for you and everyone in that same boat, so to speak.

So just to state it clearly for the record: a great GDE is not a substitute for winning consistently. But it absolutely can and should be a fundamental part of building a fanbase, especially through rough times. When you are empowered to make memorable experiences with your kith and kin, a down season can't stop you from having a good time - just ask T-Rex!

When you've got a great GDE culture established, successful seasons get that much sweeter too (again, as many experienced during the Briles era). Fan engagement is no replacement for winning - but universities that enjoy the luxury of faithful fanbases who aren't fair-weather usually do so because they've never lost sight of the crucial importance of GDE. And under Mack, we most certainly did exactly that.

Whining online while promoting game day boycotts is fair-weather loser behavior. Doug deserves a chance to resuscitate Baylor's GDE, because it's a necessary component to fixing what's wrong with Baylor sports (and the FB experience in particular).

___
*that's also in large part because the Lot 6 Tailgaters that I was blessed to hang with got to keep tailgating in full fashion even as Jerry wound down the tailgating scene at that glorious old house of football that was Texas Stadium. One of their most epic tailgates, the one I remember most clearly, was the game that closed TS down vs the Ravens (epic tailgate, classic 'Boys ****ty game).

Winning is not the biggest thing in fan engagement, it is the only thing.

CorsicanaBear said:

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Winning is not the biggest thing in fan engagement, it is the only thing.

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If your team winning is the ONLY source of joy you can get from sports, unless you're a native of a blueblood program's footprint eg Ohio State or Alabama, you'll have to bandwagon constantly or you're going to be miserable pretty often. Both options are sad and lame. There are better ways to live!

To be clear:

• I prefer winning to losing, 100% of the time.
• I'd take a title-winning season with lousy GDE over a losing season with great GDE. 100% of the time.

But it's not a binary situation: you can vastly improve GDE while also being committed to on-field change. In this NIL+Portal era, a great GDE is one of the necessary revenue engines a program needs to thrive: Doug has to completely revamp GDE, because it's a crucial tool in maximizing fan support.

___
PS - Tech's fans showed up loud and proud through decades of mediocrity before Cody Campbell came along to save the day. And they never quit on the program on game days...even after Leach (their Briles equivalent) got done very dirty by their school. But somehow we Baylor fans like to pretend we're superior to those dirty "pizza delivery guys" out in Lubbock because "We won't accept mediocrity!"

It would be funny if it weren't sad.

TenBears said:

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bear2be2 said:

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CorsicanaBear said:

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Fan engagement had gotten poor because winning has gotten poor. Win and the fans engage themselves. Lose and there is nothing you can do to engage them.

Fan engagement is a myth sold to losers.

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Winning cures all, but Mack was uniquely terrible at engaging fans because he literally didn't care about them, and it was obvious.

His tenure was one unforced error after another where fan engagement/trust was involved.

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And literally ignoring boosters with 8 to 9 figure net worths just because he thought they might have been loyal to Briles.

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Irony doesn't get any thicker than this.

But thinking about fan engagement, what do you think has already happened at ENMU?

A good GDE, until the game starts, is a hard sell for many.