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Baylor quarterback Bryce Petty (14) scored two rushing touchdowns in the second quarter to break the game open after a sloppy start by the Bears.
WACO, Tex. — Baylor's football revival continued Thursday, on national television, at sold-out Floyd Casey Stadium. It is a renaissance best explained by a tarp.
A missing tarp, to be specific. An infamous tarp that normally covers the seats in the south end zone, seats that this season — and in so many previous seasons — remained unused and symbolized longtime futility earned the hard way, with defeat after embarrassing defeat.
On Thursday, as interested Bowl Championship Series parties and a nation of college football fanatics watched Baylor dismantle Oklahoma, 41-12, the tarp stayed in a storage building across from the main parking lots. Fans clad in black filled those once-empty seats, Baptists and heathens, die-hards and newcomers, Baylor Nation out in force and on its collective feet.
"We rolled that thing up and put it away," Athletic Director Ian McCaw said in a quiet moment off to the side at the postgame news conference. "Never to be seen again."
This was Baylor, recent Baylor, where under Coach Art Briles everything is different. A sign in the stands read "Pasadena or Bust," referring to the site of the national championship game. The band played. The fans stayed.
Stanford would in short order knock Oregon from the ranks of the unbeaten, and Briles would stand before a roomful of reporters and reminisce on his pitch from five years earlier, when he peddled a fantasy of seasons like this season and games like Thursday night's.
"We didn't have a lot of reality," Briles said. "We wanted trailblazers. We wanted mavericks. We wanted guys to go down a path no one had ever been down before."
Mission accomplished. This game ranked among the most important contests in Baylor history and, in tandem with the Oregon-Stanford showdown, marked perhaps the best Thursday night of college football ever. Here were four teams in the top 10 of the B.C.S. standings matched in two games with national championship implications. Here was a college football playoff before the debut of the college football playoff system.
The home crowd assembled early in the parking lots, more than four hours before kickoff. Smoke rose from grills. Plates filled with brisket. The Bears issued more than 400 news media credentials, a record. Ken Starr, the university president and former federal judge widely known as the special prosecutor in the case against President Bill Clinton, led a group onto the field, where it formed a tunnel as players sprinted out through smoke.
It was a Texas Forever kind of night.
No. 5 Baylor (8-0, 5-0 Big 12) entered the evening favored by two touchdowns, which felt foreign to those familiar with this rivalry, even if it hardly qualified as such with the No. 12 Sooners (7-2, 4-2) having won 21 of 22 previous encounters. But this was not mighty Oklahoma, not in the usual sense. And this was not Baylor, not in the decades-of-lost-seasons sense.
This was recent Baylor, offensive juggernaut, Oregon South, a team that before Thursday had scored 164 points — in seven first quarters this season. Baylor entered this contest with an average margin of victory of 48 points. Only one team (Kansas State) had "held" the Bears under 59.
Baylor turned a sloppy, discombobulated start Thursday into another blowout in which it passed and ran and scored at will. The victory sealed Baylor's first 8-0 start, and the spotlight uncovered a defense nearly as dominant as its celebrated offensive counterpart and with far less accompanying fanfare.
The defensive coordinator Phil Bennett reclined in a chair and held court with reporters. He called this the best defensive performance of the season and a "validating game." Baylor's starting offense and starting defense, Bennett said, square off for 30 plays against each other every Tuesday and Wednesday. Good-on-good, he called it.
Bennett said he always judged his defense on how it played in those good-on-good practice sessions, and before last season's Holiday Bowl, he noticed the unit had begun to more than hold its own. It was competitive.
"You see it," he said. "How we had been before was gone."
The defense held on early in a first half that was, in a word, bizarre. It needed only a full moon to descend into complete chaos.
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No. 5 Baylor 41, No. 12 Oklahoma 12: In a Chaotic Game, Baylor Leaves Its Past and Oklahoma Far Behind
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