Baylor AD Mack Rhoades and new football coach Matt Rhule (Photo: Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune Herald via AP)
Remember last week, when legendary Baylor football coach Grant Teaff implored newly appointed Bears head man Matt Rhule to go and hire some Texas high school coaches to build a bond to the state’s high school programs? Well, Rhule apparently took that advice very seriously.
RELATED: Legendary Baylor coach to Matt Rhule: Better go hire some Texas HS coaches
Less than a week after being named as Baylor’s next head football coach, Rhule and the Bears announced that they had hired longtime San Antonio-area coach David Wetzel to a position to-be-named in large part to build bridges to the state’s high school football communities. Wetzel is a perfect person to accomplish that because he currently serves as the president of the Texas High School Coaches Association, as noted by the Dallas Morning News.
In fact, if Wetzel’s name sounds familiar, that may be because we’ve written about him here before. It was Wetzel who attacked Bishop Gorman with ferocity as a dual broadside to “football factory” schools and an ode to the sanctity of Texas’ high school football as a family and a product. His furore with the Bishop Gormans and IMG Academies of the world was surely spiked by the departure of quarterback Kellen Mond from San Antonio Reagan — where Wetzel is the head coach — for IMG Academy.
RELATED: Coaches association president rips Bishop Gorman in ode to Texas high school football
Now Wetzel will be retuning to his alma mater, where he competed on the football team in 1990 and 1991, to try and do what IMG and Gorman successfully did to his star pupil: Recruit players to Baylor. Needless to say, he has his work cut out for him, with just one member of the current Class of 2017 heading to Waco.