Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Texas

by Nick Eatman

  Though the investigation remained confidential to the public, there were some prior incidents that led to Baylor’s having to suspend a pair of defensive starters. Shawn Oakman’s senior season hit a road bump as he was forced to miss the opener at SMU for what Baylor specified as “team violations.” Safety Orion Stewart was suspended as well, although both of them made the trip on Friday with their teammates to Dallas for the season opener. Briles was informed of the issues regarding both players on Thursday before the game, but was told that nothing more was needed than a one-game suspension. From a football standpoint, he certainly wasn’t happy to miss a pair of defensive starters who had practiced with the team for all of the off-season, only to make a last-second change the night before.

  Still, just like the team had done a few weeks before by seemingly overcoming the dark cloud that hovered over the program during the Ukwuachu ruling, Baylor and its team pushed on, straight through to Dallas for a nationally-televised showdown with SMU.

  Standing by the bus, Briles recalled a recent visit to this very campus. While visiting his oldest daughter, Jancy, who lived in Dallas’ uptown district just a few blocks from SMU, the two went for an afternoon run. The goal wasn’t exactly to wind up at an in-state rival’s school, but thanks to the unbearable heat, the best route back to her house actually took them right through the heart of SMU’s beautiful location. Wearing a gray Dri-FIT shirt—long-sleeved, of course—with a Baylor logo on his chest and black shorts with another BU logo on the leg, the head coach of the Mustangs’ first opponent was turning some heads and even catching a few glares from the onlookers who seemed to recognize him.

  Was he sending a message? Was Briles taunting them by taking a run right through their campus? That was hardly the intention, but the coach quickly visualized the thought of one of his rival coaches taking a jaunt through Baylor’s campus and McLane Stadium, and realized he would’ve likely been put off had the tables been turned.

  “We better get on out of here,” he said with a chuckle, and the two put their heads down and pretended to focus solely on their journey as they trekked on back to the house.

  But now, on this Friday afternoon in early September, Briles and his team were the main attraction, not only on the Dallas campus, but also in the college football world. This game, their season opener, would be taking place on a Friday instead of a Saturday, and while Friday night games have a way of throwing the schedule off a bit, Briles was never worried about this one. Not only was it the first game of the season, meaning a routine hadn’t even been set yet, but he knew they’d be the only college game on TV nationally.

  “The world is watching,” he said to his team as they prepared to dress for the game. And unlike most weeks where Briles picked a handful of seniors to go into the equipment room and literally select the entire uniform for the upcoming game, the head coach gave them a rather strong suggestion for this matchup.

  SMU had publicly promoted the season opener to its fans as a “White Out,” encouraging the students, alumni, and other onlookers to dress in white in support of Chad Morris and his first game as the Mustangs’ head coach. But since SMU decided to wear its traditional blue jerseys, that gave the Bears an opportunity to match, and perhaps mock, the home team’s publicity stunt.

  “Let’s show them a white-out,” Briles said to his players as they started to trickle out onto the field, wearing white helmets, jerseys, and pants. If anything, it gave the Bears an advantage, considering the first quarter of the game with this 6 p.m. kickoff would be played under the sun.

  But like everything else swirling around the Bears program, what the team wore on the field wasn’t really a concern. Uniforms, suspensions, investigations, accusations—all of these matters were being put to the side. This Baylor team was finally going to be able to simply play a real game of football.

  “It’s already hot,” said one of the Bears’ strength coaches. “Might as well start hot. Let’s go. Let’s go show them who we are.”

  Briles typically liked to get the football first, and this game was no exception. Winning the toss allowed him to see what the entire staff had been waiting for all off-season, dating back to spring football when Seth Russell won the starting quarterback job.

  When Russell showed up on Baylor’s campus in the fall of 2013, he didn’t have many supporters who imagined he would one day be the team’s starting quarterback. In fact, during Russell’s final high school game of his career—a playoff game for Garland High School at the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington—he was benched in the third quarter and replaced by an underclassman who rallied his team into overtime. Russell was inserted back into the game but threw a costly interception that proved to be his final attempt of his high school career.

  Still, Russell landed at Baylor, and immediately surprised his coaches, teammates, and any other onlookers with his uncanny athleticism. While his 6–3, 200-pound frame wasn’t overly impressive looking, his ability to run the forty-yard dash in around 4.5 seconds didn’t hurt. He quickly gained some popularity with his teammates during pickup basketball games when the scrawny, baby-faced “white kid from Garland” would throw down a thunderous reverse-slam dunk with relative ease.

  For a redshirt season, and then two more as a backup to All-Big 12 standout Bryce Petty, Russell certainly was well-liked by his teammates. And his coaches trusted him enough to give him the starting job.

  But none of them actually knew just how Russell would respond when the (ESPN) lights came on.

  On the first play of the season, Russell calmly took a shotgun snap, set his feet, and lofted a perfectly thrown ball into the hands of Corey Coleman, who got behind the defense for a 42-yard gain right in front of Baylor’s bench.

  “Here we go,” passing game coordinator Jeff Lebby said on the headsets. “That’s a hell of a connection for the 2015 season.”

  And off the Bears went, as they hurried up to the line of scrimmage, calling three straight running plays, including a 25-yard rush by Shock Linwood on his first carry of the year. Goal-line specialist Devin Chafin entered the game and scored on his first touch, plowing into the end zone to cap off a 75-yard drive that took four plays and all of fifty seconds.

  “Welcome to the show,” Briles said to Russell as he walked off the field, garnering head-slaps from his teammates as he quickly went to the bench for a breather. What he didn’t realize was how quickly he would be back on the field.

  Briles was right. This was indeed a show, despite the Bears being favored by 35.5 points by the Las Vegas oddsmakers. SMU was here to play and after a long kickoff return to midfield, the Mustangs’ new quarterback, Matt Davis, one-upped Russell with his first pass, firing a touchdown strike to tie the score.

  Russell knew where to go as the second drive began—back to Coleman, who caught a slant over the middle and raced sixty yards to set up another touchdown, this time a run by Russell, who read the defense on an option play to find the end zone.

  But SMU was just as inspired, and the White-Out crowd had started to fill up the home side of the stadium rather nicely. The Mustangs were hanging around, tying the game at 14, but their defense couldn’t stop the Bears, who scored on their third possession and had the ball back near midfield just before the end of the first quarter.

  Sophomore receiver KD Cannon was one of Baylor’s highest-touted recruits just one year earlier. Unlike many of the Baylor receivers who redshirted as true freshmen, only to play four more seasons, Cannon quickly exploded onto the scene in 2014 with 1,038 receiving yards to earn consensus Freshman All-American honors.

  But Cannon, who ran his mouth seemingly as much as he ran routes, had been jawing with the SMU secondary from the start. After Russell carried the ball for a first down, cornerback Ajee Montes had finally had enough and decked Cannon after the play, which resulted in a personal foul penalty.

  But Cannon was heated. The fifteen
yards for the offense just wasn’t enough.

  “You and me, let’s go,” he barked at Montes, waving him up to the line of scrimmage for the next play. “I’ve got you, right here.”

  Almost the equivalent of calling a home run shot in baseball, Cannon barely made any moves off the line, but easily sprinted past the cornerback as well as his safety help. Both players were five yards behind Cannon, who hauled in Russell’s perfect pass at the goal line for a touchdown.

  “What?!” Cannon exploded, nearly getting a penalty for spiking the ball, but instead just receiving a warning from the official. “We’re going to eat all night!”

  Four possessions, four touchdowns for the Russell-led Bears with the quarterback already owning two touchdown passes and another score on the ground—and that was just in the first quarter of the first game of the season. Apparently shootouts were in the Texas air along with the heat.

  Although on pace to surpass one hundred points on the night, Baylor cooled off dramatically, failing to add to its point total in the second quarter as the Mustangs hung right with the number four–ranked Bears, trailing 28–21 at the half. And it could’ve been much closer had SMU managed its time better before the break. Instead, the team let the clock run out with the offense on the Baylor 10-yard line, failing to even get a field goal.

  In one locker room, the Mustangs had to be ecstatic, trailing Baylor by just a touchdown. They still had the momentum, the home crowd, and a young team with growing confidence.

  “We were pretty confident, too,” Briles recalled of his team’s thinking in the other locker room. “We knew we just needed to settle down. I think we had a better understanding of what (SMU’s offense) was going to do.”

  They were so confident that the Mustangs never scored another point. Anchored by nose tackle Andrew Billings, who controlled the line of scrimmage from start to finish, Baylor applied more pressure in the second half and never allowed SMU to get on track again.

  Meanwhile, Russell kept the train rolling for the Bears, firing two third-quarter touchdowns to Jay Lee, who had plenty of family and friends in the stands from his hometown of Allen, a northern suburb of Dallas. Lee only had three catches in the game, but all went for touchdowns as Baylor pulled away dramatically in the third and fourth quarters.

  While Russell was slicing up the Mustangs on the stat sheet, it was a play that didn’t count that seemed to get his coaches the most excited. Midway through the fourth quarter, he kept the ball on a run option, darted through an opening in the line, and then took off for a 60-yard touchdown that was actually called back because of a holding penalty. But the move showed that Russell had turned the corner. It was clear things had now changed with this offense.

  Kendal Briles, the son of Baylor’s head coach who was beginning his first full season as the offensive coordinator, shouted on the headsets to his fellow coaches.

  “We’ve got a different animal now, boys,” Kendal said. “This is a new toy for us. He’s different.”

  The younger Briles was referring to Russell’s speed, an element the offense hadn’t been accustomed to since Robert Griffin III, who hoisted the Heisman Trophy in his final year with the Bears in 2011.

  Baylor decided to pull Russell from the game after that negated touchdown, inserting freshman phenom, Jarrett Stidham, the highest-recruited quarterback Briles and the Bears had ever landed. He could run, he could throw, he was big, and he was smart. And, he was just eighteen years old. Still, the thought of redshirting him was never really considered because the coaches knew if anything were to happen to Russell, Stidham would be the next-best option, despite his lack of experience.

  On the first play of his collegiate career, Stidham reared back and flung the ball deep to a wide-open Chris Platt, who had to adjust on the fly but hauled in the pass for a 42-yard touchdown. Platt, a speedster in his own right, was greeted first by Stidham, the youngster turning on the jets in excitement and sprinting to greet the recipient of his first college pass.

  The colorful and always playful Cannon gave his own assessment of the play to the freshman quarterback.

  “Man, that throw was terrible,” he said with a smile, but not exactly joking. “That was behind him. He made you look good.”

  Stidham was too excited to care. He was one-for-one with a touchdown pass to open his career. Meanwhile, Russell was thinking about one of his passes as well.

  “Hey, Seth, how many touchdowns did you get tonight?” asked one of the backup kickers on the sideline.

  Russell responded with an honest shrug. “I don’t really know. But I do know I had an interception. I know that. I threw a pick, so that’s really all I know.”

  The answer was five, and whether or not Russell was aware of that, he knew his coaches would pay more attention to the one SMU caught, rather than the ones that helped his teammates reach the end zone.

  Baylor had a chance to score late, something that would’ve pleased the gamblers who thought the Bears would easily cover the spread, but instead, Briles opted not to kick a late field goal, giving Baylor the 56–21 win.

  After addressing his team in a joyous locker room and speaking to the media in a makeshift interview area, Briles found some familiar faces from Stephenville, Texas—where he coached the high school team for twelve years from 1988 to 1999 and won four state championships—waiting outside. Some of his former players, who still lived in the small Texas town, were on hand to watch their local product, Stidham, in his first game.

  For all of the great quarterbacks who have rolled through Stephenville—several of which were coached by Briles, including his own son Kendal—there were many who thought Stidham was the best. And recruiting services would tend to agree, ranking Stidham in the Top 10 nationally among dual-threat quarterbacks who could run and pass. Originally committed to Texas Tech, Stidham changed his decision during his senior season and reopened the recruitment. That opened the door again for Briles, who made sure he didn’t miss out on the hometown hero for a second time.

  Even though Briles had been the head coach of Baylor for years, in many ways he was still the quintessential Texas high school coach. His years in Stephenville were formative ones, and you could still hear in his voice the traces of the Texas high school coach he once was. One of the things his former Yellow Jacket players recalled the most was Briles’ ability to relate to the students as people, not just their coach. Briles wouldn’t just oversee the weight-lifting period, but he would partner up with some of the bigger lineman and participate in the lifting program right along with them. To lighten the mood, Briles would often crank up the radio in the weight room and try to name the band of the song before anyone else in the room. One player once recalled Briles’ yelling in the middle of a bench-press lift, “Six … seven … eight … Led Zeppelin … nine … ten.”

  At Baylor, Briles hadn’t changed his ways, trying even harder at times to relate to the players’ needs. Like them, he was also a college football player back in the 1970s at Houston and understood the challenges of balancing school, football, a social life, and doing all of it while fighting off homesickness as well.

  Some college coaches will elevate themselves above their players, becoming larger than life figures and ruling from on high; maybe it was because his time at Stephenville stayed with him, but that was never Briles’ style.

  As the freshman quarterback approached his head coach, Briles teased him in a fun-loving way—his way of letting Stidham know he played well but not to get too proud of himself since he had just one college game under his belt.

  They shared a laugh, as did the others. For Briles and his family, it felt good to laugh a little. The last few weeks certainly hadn’t been filled with an abundance of comedy.

  As it turned out, the next couple of weeks weren’t going to be that much fun, either.

  Sunday

  Expectations are a t
ough thing in Texas. It doesn’t matter what level of play: accountability is often demanded for even minor failure to live up to expectations.

  Perhaps no one knows this better than the members of the Dallas Cowboys. When you play for the Cowboys, wins are expected, even when things seem at their most unrealistic. This is in part because everyone in the state is watching. Texas has thousands of high school football programs and dozens of college teams. But there is only one Dallas Cowboys.

  There is an infamous quote from the introductory press conference after Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys franchise in 1989 that still gets replayed seemingly every year when it’s close to football season.

  “There is no substitute for winning,” said Jones, then forty-six years old. “We must win. We will win. Win is the name of the game.”

  And while Jones has indeed won three Super Bowls, it had now been twenty years since he last hoisted the Lombardi Trophy after his team claimed Super Bowl XXX with a 27–17 victory over the Steelers at the end of the 1995 season.

  Hanging on the wall in his Valley Ranch office was a cartoon with two buzzards sitting on a branch, the popular caption reading, “Patience my ass! I want to kill something.” Given that, imagine what had been festering inside of Jones as the 2015 season approached. The soon-to-be seventy-three-year-old was still searching for his elusive fourth Super Bowl, which would be the sixth title in the Cowboys’ illustrious history.

  Less than a week after undergoing hip replacement surgery, Jones gingerly walked to the stage for the annual Cowboys Kickoff Luncheon, held on September 2 at AT&T Stadium. This suit-and-tie pep rally of sorts was for fans and sponsors to meet the team, but the event also raised funds for the Courage House at Happy Hill Farm, a private day and boarding school that helps at-risk children.