Last Chance in Waco: Baylor 2026 Preview and the Dave Aranda Survival Test

Dave Aranda should not have a job. That is not an insult — it is the consensus position of nearly every national outlet that ranked offseason hot seats, and it is a defensible read of the math. Aranda is 36-37 overall at Baylor and a brutal 22-28 since the night his 2021 team won the Big 12 and beat Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl. Strip out that 12-2 miracle and his Baylor tenure is a sub-.450 coach who has now posted three losing seasons in four years, the latest a 5-7 face-plant that missed a bowl and finished 3-6 in the league.

He has a job anyway, and how he kept it tells you everything about the stakes of 2026.

How Aranda survived

When Baylor stumbled to 5-5 last November, the program lost its athletic director before it lost its coach. Mack Rhoades — who had also been chairing the College Football Playoff selection committee — abruptly resigned. Many in Waco assumed Aranda was next. Instead, president Linda Livingstone stepped in, conducted what the school called a “comprehensive review,” and announced Aranda would return for a seventh season.

Read the stated reasons and you understand this was a stay of execution, not a vote of confidence. Livingstone cited the desire for stability while the school searched for a new AD, the need to protect the locker room and a ranked recruiting class, and — the part nobody said out loud but everybody understood — money. Aranda is making $4.7 million on a contract that runs through 2029, with a buyout the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Mac Engel pegged in the neighborhood of $12 million. In the current revenue-sharing and NIL crunch, that’s a check Baylor decided it would rather not write in a transition year.

New AD Doug McNamee — a Baylor grad who came back from running Field & Stream and, before that, the Gaines family’s Magnolia brand — was hired in early December. He’s said all the diplomatic things (”we’re in it to win it”), but he didn’t hire Aranda, and he owes him nothing. That is the definition of a put-up-or-shut-up season. If 2026 goes sideways, McNamee gets to make his first big swing as athletic director, and the buyout math only gets easier with each passing month.

What changed: a new defense and a near-total roster flip

Give Aranda credit for one thing — he didn’t sit still. The single biggest move was finally taking his hands off the defense. After years of calling it himself (the unit cratered to 87th nationally in total defense in 2025, surrendering 392.1 yards per game and a ghastly 32.6 points per game, 122nd in the country), Aranda hired Kansas State’s Joe Klanderman to run it. Klanderman spent six seasons coordinating one of the Big 12’s most consistent defenses in Manhattan, and he inherits a fixable disaster: Baylor’s run defense allowed 197.2 yards per game and 30 rushing touchdowns last fall, a number only Colorado was worse than in the entire conference.

Then came the portal. Baylor lost 23 players and replaced them with roughly 22 incoming transfers, a near-complete teardown of the two-deep. The losses were severe and they hit the spots that hurt most:

QB Sawyer Robertson graduated (3,681 yards, 31 TD, second in the FBS at 306.8 passing yards per game) and went undrafted, signing as a UDFA.
RB Bryson Washington, the homegrown Central Texas back who ran for 1,000 yards in 2024, left for Auburn — and the schedule wasted no time, handing him a Week 1 reunion against the program that developed him. More on that below.
The entire skill-position core walked: WRs Kole Wilson, Josh Cameron and Ashtyn Hawkins and TE Michael Trigg all departed.
On defense, leading tackler LB Keaton Thomas went to Ole Miss, second-leading tackler Devyn Bobby went to the NFL, OL Coleton Price went to Kentucky, edge Matthew Fobbs-White to Virginia, and S DJ Coleman to Florida.

That is not retooling. That is a new team.

The offense: the most talented Baylor QB since RG3

Here’s why there’s a pulse in Waco anyway. Aranda and OC Jake Spavital landed DJ Lagway, the former Florida five-star and Mr. Football out of Willis, Texas — a player Dave Campbell’s Texas Football called the most talented quarterback to play at Baylor since Robert Griffin III. The fit is almost too neat: Lagway’s father, Derek, played running back at Baylor from 1987 to 1991. Lagway framed the move as coming home and “finding peace” after coaching upheaval in Gainesville.

The talent is genuine. The production is a warning. Lagway threw for 2,264 yards with 16 touchdowns in 2025 — but also 14 interceptions, in an injury-hampered, up-and-down campaign. As a true freshman in 2024 he went for 1,915 yards, 12 touchdowns and nine picks. The arm talent and athleticism are clear; the decision-making is not. Spavital’s entire reputation rests on developing quarterbacks, and this is the test case that defines his — and Aranda’s — fate. If Lagway cuts the turnovers and plays like the recruiting ranking, Baylor has a top-three Big 12 ceiling. If he plays like the 14-interception version, the floor is ugly.

Around him, the skill corps is almost entirely new. Spavital reloaded the receiver room through the portal with Hardley Gilmore IV (Kentucky, by way of a Louisville flip), Dre’lon Miller (Colorado) and Gavin Freeman (Oklahoma State), and reunited Lagway with his Florida tight end Tony Livingston. The offensive line was rebuilt brick by brick — Nate Kibble (Texas), Yakiri Walker (Memphis, the likely starting center), Cole Rhett (Toledo), Logan Moore (UAB) and Asher Hale (South Alabama) join returning competition in Koltin and Kaden Sieracki. The running back room is the lingering question: with Washington gone, Caden Knighten and Michael Turner are the names, but there’s no proven Big 12 workhorse on the roster. That’s a lot of new parts that have to gel by September — and they don’t get a soft landing.

The defense: Klanderman’s reclamation project

Klanderman returns some usable pieces — safeties Jacob Redding and Tyler Turner, and linebacker Kyland Ree anchor a unit that otherwise lost its two leading tacklers. The portal answered the trenches first, where the bleeding was worst: DL Jordan Mack (Coastal Carolina) and DL Daemian Wimberly (UTSA) were brought in specifically to plug a run defense that was second-worst in the league, with LB Anthony Crenshaw Jr. (Delaware) added as a do-it-all linebacker.

The honest projection: Klanderman’s track record says this defense climbs from “historically bad” to “respectable,” and that alone could be worth a game or two in the standings. But asking a brand-new front seven to suddenly stop the run against this schedule is a big ask, and pass defense — the unit’s other glaring 2025 weakness — remains the swing variable in any close game.

The schedule, game by game

Baylor opens at a neutral site and closes with a November gauntlet. Here’s the lean on all twelve:

Sept 5 — vs. Auburn (Atlanta, Aflac Kickoff): A rematch of the 2025 opener, when Jackson Arnold gashed Baylor — and now the stakes are layered. This is the debut of new Auburn head coach Alex Golesh (poached from USF), who will be desperate for an opening-night statement to launch his tenure on the Plains. Worse for Baylor’s nerves: he gets to chase that momentum win with Bryson Washington, Baylor’s own former 1,000-yard back, in his backfield against the team that recruited and developed him. A revenge game, a coaching debut, and a hot-seat opener all in one. Auburn is a coin-flip program itself (Vegas around 6.5 wins), but the emotional edge tilts toward the Tigers. Toss-up, slight lean Auburn.
Sept 12 — Prairie View A&M: FCS tune-up. Win.
Sept 19 — Louisiana Tech (home): Should be comfortable. Win.
Sept 26 — Colorado (home): The Buffs are projected for a long rebuild (some outlets have them at 2-10). Baylor’s most winnable Power Four game. Win, lean.
Oct 3 — at Arizona State (Tempe): Tough road trip against a 7.5-win-total team. Lean loss.
Oct 17 — TCU (home, The Revivalry): Baylor has beaten TCU exactly once since 2020. The rivalry and the home setting say toss-up; the history says otherwise. Toss-up, lean loss.
Oct 24 — at Kansas: Lance Leipold’s Jayhawks are dangerous and this is on the road. Toss-up.
Oct 30 — at UCF (Orlando): A long midweek-window trip against a middling Knights team. Toss-up.
Nov 7 — Iowa State (home): The Cyclones are steady and well-coached. Toss-up, lean loss.
Nov 14 — at BYU (Provo): BYU is an 8.5-to-10-win team and a nightmare road environment. Likely loss.
Nov 21 — Texas Tech (home): The Big 12 favorite (10.5-win total, a 2025 Playoff team). Likely loss.
Nov 28 — at Houston (rivalry): A rebuilt Houston program on the road to close the year. Toss-up, lean loss.

The record prediction

Three wins are close to banked: the two non-conference soft spots plus Colorado. After that, Baylor has to mine the rest of the schedule for three more, and that’s where the math turns cruel. The opener against Auburn is the tell — a revenge-fueled Bryson Washington and a new coach hunting a launch-point win, against a Baylor team breaking in a new quarterback, a new line and a new defense all at once. I have that as a loss. From there the road games at Arizona State, BYU and Houston are uphill, Texas Tech and Iowa State come to Waco as the better teams, and history says TCU owns this rivalry.

The market already leans this way. Vegas set the win total at 6.5 and the books hammered the under — OddsShark has Baylor at +138 to go over, among the longest such odds in the entire conference — while College Football News projected a flat 5-7.

I’m with them, and I’ll say the quiet part out loud: 5-7, no bowl, and Dave Aranda is fired. The realistic best case is the Bears split the two road toss-ups at Kansas and UCF, hold serve in the three games they should win, and land right back where they were a year ago. That’s the optimistic read. The pessimistic one — Lagway’s interception problem follows him from Gainesville and a rebuilt front seven can’t stop the run any better than the last one did — is a 4-8 freefall. Either way, the destination is the same. This is a high-variance roster with a genuine ceiling if everything breaks right, but “everything breaks right” is not a plan you bet a coach’s job on, and Baylor isn’t betting on it either.

What Aranda actually needs to do to keep his job

Strip away the noise and it comes down to three things, in order of importance.

1. Reach a bowl. Full stop. Six wins is the floor for survival, not the bar for safety. A fourth losing season in five years under a coach McNamee didn’t hire, with a buyout that shrinks every month, is the easiest firing in America to justify. Miss a bowl and the season-long “comprehensive review” writes its own conclusion. Aranda has to get to six.

2. Beat someone who matters. Bowl eligibility built on Prairie View, La Tech and Colorado won’t move the needle with a new AD evaluating the brand. Aranda needs a signature result — knock off Auburn in the opener to flip the 2025 script, or finally beat TCU in the Revivalry for only the second time since 2020. One genuine “that’s why we kept him” win changes the entire framing of the season.

3. Prove the Lagway bet pays off. This is the deeper survival test. Aranda spent his offseason capital — and a chunk of the program’s NIL budget — to land a five-star and hand the offense to Spavital. If Lagway develops into a top-tier Big 12 quarterback, Aranda can sell a recruiting and development story that buys him a future even with a middling record. If Lagway throws 15 picks and the offense sputters, the whole rebuild reads as a failed Hail Mary, and no record short of a genuine breakthrough saves him.

The cleanest way to read 2026: bowl eligibility keeps him employed; seven-plus wins with a signature scalp and a developing Lagway keeps him comfortable; anything south of six ends it. Baylor handed Dave Aranda a loaded gun and one more bullet. Here’s the hard part for Bears fans hoping for a different ending: I don’t think he hits the target. The schedule is too steep, the roster too freshly assembled, and the margin for a coach McNamee never wanted too thin. Pencil in 5-7, a third losing season in four years, and a new name on the McLane Stadium sideline come December. The Lagway era in Waco may be just beginning — but I don’t think Dave Aranda will be the one coaching it in 2027.