By Foster Nicholas | Sports Editor
HOUSTON—Baylor football walked out of NRG Stadium Monday afternoon with smiles on their faces after running through drills with more than 100 kids from the DePelchin Children’s Center. Yet head coach Dave Aranda was clear that this team was hungry to keep a six-game winning streak that started more than two months ago alive against LSU in the Kinder’s Texas Bowl on Tuesday.
“I think it’s really important that we win in this game, you know, to finish what we started,” Aranda said. “If we do that, it puts us in a good position for next year to go and win some more. We’ve really worked hard to win. This is going to be a tough game to win, but we need to win this game.”
The Bears (8-4) arrived in Houston on Thursday to begin local practices and participated in other Kinder’s Texas Bowl events in the days leading up to the event. They dropped the Rodeo Bowl to the Tigers (8-4) on Saturday, an event where each team competed in a variety of rodeo challenges in NRG Arena. On Monday, the teams came together to participate in a field day with the athletes and coaches mentoring children in foster care through eight different football-themed drills.
Riding its longest single-season winning streak under Aranda, redshirt junior safety Michael Allen noted the challenges of balancing the fun and fulfillment of the bowl game atmosphere before gearing up for a big game.
“We haven’t been to a bowl game since 2022, so the Texas Bowl has done a great job of keeping us entertained,” redshirt sophomore safety Michael Allen said. “It’s kind of tough, you know, the battle of having fun when those things are happening, but also be able to focus on the game at hand… We’ve done a great job with a lot of different activities, but also getting the necessary work we need before tomorrow.”
LSU head coach Brian Kelly said the confidence that comes with a six-game winning streak makes Baylor a dangerous team to face in the final game of the season.
“The game is such an interesting one in that momentum, belief, confidence, they all play a role,” Kelly said. “When teams are fairly equal, and that’s what the case is, all those things that I just mentioned play a role. You’re playing a team that believes they’re going to win. They’ve won games that they hadn’t won in a long time. They’ve gotten all that out of the way. So, that’s probably the biggest challenge.”
Baylor’s bowl history against LSU dates back to 1963, when the Bears secured a 14-7 victory over the Tigers in the Bluebonnet Bowl. The last meeting between the teams came in the 1985 Liberty Bowl, where the green and gold won 21-7. Additionally, Aranda spent four seasons in Baton Rouge as the defense coordinator and won the 2019 National Championship before taking over in Waco prior to the 2020 season.
Despite Aranda’s strong ties back to LSU and a bowl game environment set for New Year’s Eve, redshirt sophomore linebacker Keaton Thomas hasn’t seen the team change anything about their approach.
“I figured I’d see more, but you know, coach Aranda is cool, calm, collected. He’s like a big Zen guy, Zen master,” Thomas joked. “[Aranda] hasn’t emphasized anything other than, this is a really good team, and we have to win our one on ones. That’s what it is, and that’s how it’s going to be.”
The Tigers will be without 17 players who have hit the transfer portal and a handful of others who opted out of the game. LSU will work with three new starters on the offensive line and have to make up for 155 catches between a tight end and two wide receivers. Aranda said Baylor’s preparation for the different contributors will require “adjustment and creativity.”
“There is going to be the adjustment that’s going to come within a game. You don’t want to be down points in making that adjustment,” Aranda said. “You want to try to get ahead of it as best you can. So that’s been a fair assessment of this past week.”
On the other hand, the Bears have had just 10 players enter the transfer portal and are expected to have 21 of 22 starters from the regular season finale available for Tuesday’s contest. After missing a bowl game in 2023 and starting the 2024 season 2-4, senior wide receiver Hal Presley said the buy-in and success came hand-in-hand.
“I feel like everybody started taking it more seriously as they saw their teammates hurt about it,” Presley said. “There were three games in a row I cried and that was just tears because I’m hurting because I love this sport. So I feel like as a collective, we all wanted to see everybody happy when we just came together.”
Kickoff is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Tuesday at NRG Stadium in Houston and will be broadcast exclusively on ESPN.
