By Dylan Fink | Sports Writer
If Baylor fans are sitting on their couch every Saturday watching the Bears and feeling as though they’ve seen this season before, that’s because they have.
A running theme so far for head coach Dave Aranda’s Bears this season is close wins. A handful of these saw Baylor narrowly escaping a team it had the talent to win favorably against, including Saturday’s 35-34 win over Kansas State or the double-overtime win over SMU in Week 2.
Between the close wins and the strangely similar results, the tone of this central Texas football season has felt eerily similar to 2019.
The 2019 Bears, led by current Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule, came into the season unranked. Just like today’s team, Rhule’s last year in Waco featured very high expectations from Baylor fans.
A talented squad that included multiple NFL talents, such as wide receiver Denzel Mims, defensive lineman Bravvion Roy and linebacker Clay Johnston, finished the season 11-3 with two losses to Oklahoma and a Sugar Bowl loss to Georgia.
While on paper, the end of the 2010s decade for the Bears seems like a very successful season, the recurring prowess of the team proved to be similar to that of Aranda’s this year: close wins propelled by a seemingly endless amount of second-half magic.
Week 3 in 2019 saw the Bears play the Rice Owls, who ended the season 3-9. Just like this year’s Week 3 matchup with Samford, the 2019 Bears came away with a win — but not before putting together a disappointing performance against a lower-level opponent. Rhule’s Sugar Bowl-bound team only topped the Owls 21-13, with senior quarterback Charlie Brewer forced to stay in a competitive game much longer than expected.
Similarities continue between the two seasons, as the Bears’ first real test in 2019 was a highly-regarded Texas Tech team. While Baylor exceeded Tech in talent, messy play allowed the game to reach double overtime. A last-second field goal pushed the Bears to victory, much like the 2025 team’s win in their test against SMU.
Baylor fans may begin to faintly hear the sounds of Sonny and Cher when comparing the two teams’ wins against Oklahoma State. A 2019 trip to Stillwater, Okla., ended in a 45-27 victory amidst a lackluster Cowboy crowd, leaving the scoreboard with the same digits as Aranda’s team did two weeks ago.
The only major difference in this matchup was the quarterback’s performance. Brewer tossed one touchdown and took four sacks in the 2019 game, while redshirt senior Sawyer Robertson posted an inverse stat line in 2025, throwing for four touchdowns and taking one sack.
The close games continued for the 2019 Bears with a 23-21 win over Iowa State, a 17-14 win over West Virginia, and a 29-23 triple overtime win over TCU. Rhule’s team trailed at halftime in each of these games, yet willed a win as a dominant second-half team.
As Aranda’s sixth campaign on the Brazos is underway, this year’s team is anything but unfamiliar with late-game magic heading into the bye week.
While mid-season comparisons may suggest that 2019 is repeating before Baylor fans’ eyes, Rhule’s last season with the Bears can be looked back on as one of the program’s best in recent history. That season consisted of hosting College GameDay in Waco, a top-10 final ranking and appearances in both the Big 12 championship game and the Sugar Bowl. When Rhule left to take the Carolina Panthers’ job after the season, he did so on a high note.
If 2025 does pan out to be a full repeat of 2019, Baylor fans ought to rejoice. An 11-3 season was no slouch in 2019, and would not be a remotely bad time loop to be stuck in.
