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[QUOTE="leftytg, post: 1615583, member: 2651"]
I think you have a distorted notion of Baylor's history, before Briles.  Baylor was just a gawd awful excuse of a football program.  As bad as Syracuse has been, Baylor was way worse.  Baylor had not had a winning season since 1995 when Briles took over and had won only 11 conference games in 12 years.  Sure, Baylor is in Texas, a fertile recruiting ground.  But practically every program recruits Texas.  Baylor was getting 3rd tier Texas talent.  Your point about Baylor being fortunate to catch UT and A&M on downswings is naive.  Outside of the last couple of years, Baylor wasn't swimming in the same recruiting pools as UT or A&M.  They certainly didn't benefit from any supposed downswing from the big dogs, which didn't even happen until several years into Briles' tenure (in UT's case, anyway).  Baylor's recruiting classes from 2005-2011 (so the players Briles inherited plus his first 4 recruiting classes) were ranked 64, 55, 52, 55, 44, 51, and 52, respectively.  It wasn't until 2012 that they broke through with a 30th ranked class.

Briles turned around an abysmal program with subpar talent.  He was successful in 1) having a unique system 2) having a sharp eye for the kinds of talent that was available to him that would thrive in this unique system and 3) he brought in RGIII in his first recruiting class.

If the argument is that Baylor's ultimate ceiling is higher than Syracuse because of its proximity to Texas high school football talent, then I would readily agree.  However, the notion that Baylor, during its ascent, was getting the kind of talent unavailable to Syracuse now is incorrect in my view.
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