Titans rookie Kendall Wright says Baylor had no playbook

Tennessee Titans rookie receiver Kendall Wright will be learning to do something that he never learned in college. Reading a playbook. Not that he has a learning disability or anything like that, it’s just that he never had to read on while he was at Baylor.

Wright says Baylor coach Art Briles never used a playbook and they didn’t huddle, opting for signals instead.

“At Baylor we didn’t huddle. Everything we did was coming off of signals and off the sideline,” Wright said. “We didn’t huddle at Baylor and we didn’t have a playbook. If we had a new play or something, we’d just draw it and go out there and run it.

“I think I memorized over 300 plays at Baylor. … We had a lot of plays. We just didn’t have a playbook. Coach Briles is a very smart man,” Wright said. “It was the same system. We were in that system for four years. It’s kind of a different kind of learning deal. We’d see it visually and we’d just go run it. It just sticks with us when we keep running it a lot.


“We’d watch film and go over a lot of it in our meetings that we had. We’d have a lot of plays on the board, and have different signals. Whatever the signal was would tell us the play.”


Wright knows he’ll have to adjust to offensive coordinator Chris Palmer’s complex playbook but with the memory he has it might not be as bad as the adjustment some rookies have.


“We didn’t have paper at Baylor. We have paper now. There’s a lot of different wordings that tell you what to do differently for things like that,” Wright said. “I think we’re the only team that didn’t have a playbook.”

TCU and Baylor combine for 13 hit batsmen

In college baseball normally there are scores of hits in any given game. Unless there is a truly special pitcher on the mound, games usually result in a 12-10 slugfest. Ok, not all games are like that but it’s pretty close.

TCU and Baylor put on the hits Tuesday night but in a different way. The two teams combined to plunk 13 batters in the game. The 13 hit batsmen were more than the hit total which was 12. 10 Baylor batters were hit and three TCU hitters were hit.

“It was ugly, it was just an ugly game,” Baylor head coach Steve Smith said in a report on the school’s website. “It’s hard to watch some of what we do, particularly on the mound. This was not a hard game to pitch, the wind is blowing in the batters’ faces, and it’s just not that hard.”  


There were more batters hit by pitches than hits (12).


There were also a combined 11 walks in the game that took 3 hours, 53 minutes to play.


Baylor leadoff batter Nathan Orf was hit by three different pitchers.


TCU starter Brandon Finnegan threw 4-2/3 innings of no-hit ball, but hit six batters.  

Surprisingly this didn’t result in a brawl, but I wonder if there’s any bad blood behind it or will it affect future meetings between the two teams.

A Fan Refers To Baylor As "She"

With the demise of the Big 12 nearly coming to fruition, Baylor is determined to be the fly in the ointment. They won’t let Texas A&M go without a fight which sets up for an interesting football game. Now Baylor is “confident” they will be able to latch on with the Big East if the Big 12 folds.

There are some, including me, who feel that Baylor is talking out of both sides of their mouth. They weren’t talking about preserving decades of Texas football when the old SWC disbanded and left Houston, Rice, TCU, and SMU on the side of the road.

One fan sums up how they feel about Baylor and likens the school to a girl.

artisan3m says:



Sep 8, 2011 4:38 PM

Baylor doesn’t belong in the Big 12 ~ never has and never will be a perennial powerhouse in football. Basketball and baseball/softball, yes. Football, no. She should be in a conference where she has at least an even chance of earning a football championship. That will never happen in a league where Baylor has a hard time finishing 1-4 in its own division on an annual basis. This will not be warmly received, but Baylor is a leech on the state universities she competes with. Her fans are fair weather supporters and if the Bears lose two games before October, it is not unlikely that the visitors will put more butts in the seats than Baylor will. She ought to be in CUSA or MWC and she is hardly a BcS contender in any conference.
 
All of this is football driven and it’s true that Baylor wants to save it’s own hide and keep their AQ money. The football program would be better served building themselves up in the Mountain West or Conference USA. They might be able to contend in the Big East with their current edition of teams there. The basketball program is up and coming so that could balance out what the Bears lack in football. But in all of this, who cares about basketball? 

    

Baylor Wants The Big 12 To Stay Together

As the Big 12 continues to go down in flames all around them, Baylor is singing like Al Green. It’s not too much of a shock that the people at Baylor want the conference to stay together. No one has been pulling at Baylor’s coattails, so they’ve started a campaign to keep things together.

Nothing is more beloved in Texas than Texas football. Entire towns travel to neighboring communities on Friday nights as rivals meet under the Friday night lights; Saturday mornings find families rushing out to pee wee football games and spending their afternoons with friends tailgating or watching some of the most historic and storied football rivalries in the nation; Sunday afternoons see families gathered in living rooms across the state to cheer on the Cowboys or the Texans.



Football in Texas is more than a passing interest, it is a part of the fabric of this great state.


Will Texans stand by and watch hundred-year-old rivalries be cast aside as the state’s largest universities align themselves with other states across the country?


Will Texans sit and watch as Texas’ flagship universities pledge their loyalties to other states?


Will Texans stand by as our most promising student athletes are lured out of Texas by new rivals?


Will Texans watch as our most precious resources—the great minds of the next generation—are exported to new conference institutions?


Texans must stand up and call the leadership of the University of Texas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech to clear-headed thinking about the state’s future. Texas’ flagship institutions of higher learning are the guardians of the state’s future—their loyalties must first be to Texas and to her citizens. Ask these leaders to take a stand for Texas and to stop this madness that will lead to the dissolution of the Big 12 and the end of an era for Texas.

This is the only stand Baylor can take or they face being left out of a BCS conference and going at it in Conference USA or the Mountain West and even that’s not guaranteed. If it wasn’t for Ann Richards, Baylor wouldn’t have been in the Big 12 in the first place (Texas Tech also got in for political reasons too).

Now you want to do what’s best for “Texas football”? Why didn’t you think about TCU, Houston, Rice, and SMU back in the 90’s? You didn’t stick up for them and now you may be the jilted bride. Of course Baylor wants the Big 12 to stick together. The problem is that the reason they want to stay together is the same reason that nobody will listen to them. They don’t have any pull in the conference and nobody has been knocking down their door to invite them into their conference. The were lumped in with the other Texas teams when the Big 8 was expanded to the Big 12 and they will be lumped into Conference USA or something like that. They are starting to come around slowly in athletics but they are still no where close to contending year after year.

Isn’t this poetic justice?