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Texas Tech football: Matt Wells isn’t only coach to struggle in first year

By Matthew Conner

LUBBOCK, TEXAS - OCTOBER 19: Head coach Matt Wells of the Texas Tech Red Raiders exits the team bus in front of the stadium before the college football game against the Iowa State Cyclones on October 19, 2019 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images)
LUBBOCK, TEXAS - OCTOBER 19: Head coach Matt Wells of the Texas Tech Red Raiders exits the team bus in front of the stadium before the college football game against the Iowa State Cyclones on October 19, 2019 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) /
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(Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images)
(Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images) /

Matt Rhule was 1-11 before turning Baylor around

There’s no question that the situation Matt Rhule inherited when he took over at Baylor in 2017 was as bleak as any in the nation.  Decimated by the Art Briles Title IX scandal and coming off a year with lame-duck Jim Grobe leading the ship in 2016, the Bears were in shambles when Rhule arrived.

Thus, it was no surprise that Rhule’s first season was a horror show.  With only a win over a Kansas team that would also go 1-11 that year, Baylor lost seven games by double-digits.

In Rhule’s first two games, Baylor managed to lose to LIberty and UT-San Antonio, both in Waco.  It was a far cry from where Rhule had been at Temple.

In four years with the Owls, the former New York Giants assistant went 28-23 at one of the most down-trodden programs in the nation.  In fact, he took Temple to bowl games in his last two seasons and even became the first Temple head coach to score a win over Penn State since 1941.

Unlike the other programs we’ve discussed,  Rhule wasn’t cast into a situation where he had to turn around a program after years of losing.  Rather, he had to deal with the expectation of a fan base that had just come off the program’s best era in its history.

From 2010-15, Briles led Baylor to an average of 9.5 wins, a period that included Big 12 titles in 2013-14 and a Hesiman Trophy for Robert Griffin III in 2011.  To say that the people in Rhule’s constituency had high expectations would be a bit of a short-sell.

To Rhule’s credit, he weathered a tough storm in his first year and stuck with a plucky freshman named Charlie Brewer who also took his lumps three years ago.  That tandem now has the Bears sitting at 8-0 and atop the Big 12 standings.

Next. The all-time Texas Tech football team from out of state. dark

Rhule may remind some of Matt Wells.  Neither was the hottest name in the industry when he arrived in the Big 12 and both could be described as rather generic and uninteresting.  But that’s just fine for fans in Waco and if Wells has the same meteoric rise while at Tech, it will go over just as well in Lubbock.

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