Big 12 Media Days: Tuesday takeaways

MORE: Monday takeaways | The secret to Lincoln Riley's recruiting success

FRISCO, Texas -- Baylor head coach Matt Rhule was not the most anticipated speaker on the second morning of Big 12 Media Days - that distinction belonged to Texas head coach Tom Herman.

That might not have been so obvious listening to Rhule give his opening statement. Before taking the stage, he had been buzzing around laughing, literally running to his pre-presser interviews with other media outlets. Many of the local news outfits from cities represented by the conference kept the cameras rolling on him while West Virginia’s Dana Holgorsen finished up his Q&A session.

When he finally took to the microphone, Rhule seemed tentative, even a little nervous as he read through a prepared statement. He knew everyone in the room couldn’t help equate Baylor with last year’s scandal, and he was relieved to point out that he couldn’t speak on it because of ongoing investigations.

Then, once the verbal tiptoeing was done, he smiled. He smiled a lot.

Everyone was mindful of what’s gone on at Baylor; how could they not be? However, unlike Jim Grobe last year who tried to speak slowly, long and deflect, Rhule spoke as though he felt like he knew he wouldn’t have enough time to tell everyone how optimistic he was about the change at Baylor, which included addressing the biggest issue in college football head on.

“Mack (Rhoades) was the first one to come here and say, ‘I’m going to leave the SEC and go be the athletic director at Baylor.' I feel like I’m called to be here, to be here in this moment and fix this,” Rhule said. “I want to move forward, but I want to move forward acknowledging the past. And you know what? This issue of sexual assault and gender violence, this isn’t a Baylor issue and this isn’t a college football issue, it’s an everyone - it’s a higher education issue.

“We cannot just come here and respond to the issue - hopefully we can be leaders.”

Rhule went on to laud specifically those hired by the university in new administrative positions to quickly and effectively clean up the institution and the sins of its past. He explained the programs and organizations that Baylor is now partnered with to try and address what it has now been synonymous with.

In addition to that, he didn’t hesitate to explain what he thought it has taken to save the 2017 recruiting class and find early success with 2018.

“All I do as we get into recruiting, I tell people, ‘You know what? Just come visit us,’” he said. “Come meet the guys on our team. You decide if you want your son to be part of the culture that we have.

“When they get around our coaches, they recognize that we’re real and honest,” he added. “We’re a Christian university. We believe in faith, service and leadership, and we don’t shy away from that… You can come to Baylor and get an elite academic experience, an elite athletic experience, and you’re coming to a place that doesn’t just care about what you can do, but also who you are.”

Given the circumstances, that the Bears came away with a top-35 class in 2017 and currently have a top-20 group in 2018 indicates somebody had to be pulling the right strings somewhere.

The name most prospects in-state have mentioned as crucial to that success has been former Cedar Hill head coach and current Baylor tight ends coach Joey McGuire. McGuire has led the charge in recruiting Texas, but Rhule said that McGuire's ability as a coach shouldn’t be discounted. The same could also be said of defensive backs coach Fran Brown.

“Joey McGuire is one of the great coaches - one of the great people - I have ever been around,” he said. “If I was coaching at Michigan next year, if I was coaching in Berlin - whatever that old world league team was - I’d hire Joey McGuire.

“Coach Fran, I think, is one of the great young coaches in college football,” he added. “I think he’ll be a head coach one day because he can connect with kids and that’s why he’s such a great recruiter and coach.”

Maybe he didn’t verbalize things in the conventional way most coaches do, but Tom Herman took a hard stance on what it means to lose and why under no circumstances is that acceptable at Texas anymore.

“Losing is awful. It’s awful,” he said. “It’s not just, 'Oh, well we’ll get ‘em next week.' No. This is like the sky-is-falling type of stuff. So every time we have a competitive situation, we’re going to to make sure that the people that don’t win, that they feel awful about it.

“It’s not funny and it’s not hokey or corny,” he continued. “It’s really, really bad for them, as well as it’s very, very cool for the guys that win and very rewarding for the guys that win.”

Throughout his time on stage, Herman referenced things he’s doing to drive home that point with his players, from giving the day’s "winners" better post-practice meals, t-shirts and other methods of illustrating "tangible rewards for winning but also tangible consequences for losing."

Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy has had no problem winning games on Saturdays, but the Cowboys haven't necessarily been taking the lion’s share of elite-level prospects on the recruiting trail relative to some other Big 12 teams.

Gundy scoffed at the notion that Oklahoma State can’t land highly-ranked prospects, but also acknowledged that the heart of his team’s playmakers haven’t come from that demographic. Case in point: James Washington. Gundy and his staff needed to see something in his star receiver that others didn’t coming out of high school, and Gundy pointed out something that has proven every bit as valuable, as it turns out, as physical measurables.

“We’ve done some research in the last few years and found that players that think really fast, are game day savvy and are really cerebral players have provided a lot of success for us,” Gundy said. “We want to know if they’ll be unselfish. We want to know if they’re really interested in getting a college education… a young man has got to be serious about getting an education in college. If not, they’re not going to make it.”

In the specific example of Washington, it seems Oklahoma State also landed a player that hadn’t peaked too early. Washington came to Stillwater at just the right time in his development both personally and as a player.

“I think James is just scratching the surface,” Gundy said. “James came from a terrific community out in West Texas, but it was a small community. When he got to our place, it was dramatically different than what he’d ever been exposed to. So he’s had three years, but I think in the next 10 years, the sky’s the limit for him.”