It speaks to how quickly fortunes can change in college football that Dave Aranda’s tenure at Baylor oscillated from going great one week to being firmly on the hot seat the next.

That was particularly the case the past month in Waco, Texas, where the Bears blew out Arizona State to seemingly cool off the talk of their head coach getting fired up right until the past weekend where a loss to Kansas proved fatal for the cerebral defensive mind’s chances of sticking around for 2027. As a result, Aranda ends his tenure with an even 40–40 record, a remarkable Big 12 title in 2021, but mostly the inability to get the program back on track for contention in the normally wide-open conference .

As a private school with resources in a talent-rich area, this could be one of the more attractive openings in college football for this coaching cycle. So, who could Baylor turn to?…