How Baylor built a Final Four team from the bottom up

There is no historical precedent for what Scott Drew was facing when he was named head coach at Baylor as a 32-year-old back in 2003. Taking over a program that had been to the NCAA tournament just once since 1950 was enough of a challenge by itself, but for Drew that would be the easy part.

The Bears were at the center of one of the most troubling scandals college athletics had ever seen when Baylor forward Carlton Dotson murdered teammate Patrick Dennehy during an argument while shooting guns not far from the campus. An attempted cover-up by former coach Dave Bliss only made the program more radioactive. Drew took the job months later as the university announced self-imposed sanctions with further punishment from the NCAA looming.

Baylor was a Big 12 doormat in Drew’s first few years in charge. By his fifth season, the Bears were back in the NCAA tournament. Two years later, they had made a run to the Elite Eight. Suddenly, Drew started landing five-star recruits like Isaiah Austin, Quincy Miller, and Perry Jones III. Baylor was becoming a tournament staple, but the program’s losses in March Madness were a lot more memorable than their wins.

In 2015, R.J. Hunter hit a buzzer-beater that sent his head coach and father Ron Hunter flying off his seat and pushed No. 14 seed Georgia State to an unlikely victory over the Bears. Baylor was upset again the next year by No. 12 seed Yale in a game that will mostly be remembered for Taurean Prince’s sarcastic post-game explanation to reporters on how to grab a rebound. A program that was lifeless 10 years earlier was now good enough to be considered an underachiever on the biggest stage.

That tag doesn’t apply anymore. Baylor is riding into the Final Four this year with a team that has been elite for two straight seasons. After being robbed of a chance to compete in the NCAA tournament a year ago as a likely No. 1 seed, Baylor returned the core of its lineup and has come back even better.

The Bears smoked eventual No. 1 seed Illinois in their third game of the season, and have looked like one of the country’s two best teams alongside Gonzaga ever since. A three-week Covid pause in February derailed the Bears’ 18-0 start, but this has again looked like a national championship favorite since entering the NCAA tournament.

Baylor is loaded with dynamic guards. It makes 41.1 percent of its three-pointers as a team, the No. 1 mark in the country. Its defense has rebounded in the tournament after showing cracks following the Covid layoff. Gonzaga might be the team that looks like one of the best college basketball has seen in the modern era, but this Baylor roster also happens to check every box for a would-be contender.

There isn’t a McDonald’s All-American or even a top-50 recruit on the Baylor roster. At a time when blue blood powerhouses like Duke and Kentucky failed to even make the tournament, Drew has the Bears rolling on the back of timely transfers and veteran recruits who took time to mature.

This is how Baylor built a Final Four team.

The foundation of Baylor’s success all year has been the three guard lineup of Jared Butler, Davion Mitchell, and MaCio Teague. None of them were originally supposed to start their college careers at Baylor.

Butler was the No. 95 overall recruit in his class when he signed with Alabama. He enrolled in school early only to see the Tide land an even more promising prospect at his position when Kira Lewis committed to the program and reclassified to enter school a year earlier than expected. Butler got his release and picked Baylor, where he quickly took over a starting role midway through his freshman year.

Mitchell was ranked as the No. 58 overall player in his class when he committed to Auburn. As a freshman, Mitchell lost out on the starting point guard spot to sophomore Jared Harper and decided to transfer at the end of the season. While Mitchell was sitting out as a transfer the next year at Baylor, Harper was leading Auburn to the Final Four. Now Mitchell has taken the Bears to the same stage by blossoming into one of the most unstoppable players in this tournament.

While Mitchell and Butler were always highly-regarded as four-star recruits, Teague couldn’t even land a high-major look out of high school in Cincinnati. That remained the case even after doing a prep year at Montverde Academy. He would sign with UNC Asheville and immediately win Big South Freshman of the Year. After an even better season as a sophomore where he made more than 43 percent of his threes for the second straight season, Teague decided to transfer to Baylor. He sat out the 2018-2019 season with Mitchell to do it.

Starting center Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua is another transfer. A native of Cameroon, JTT signed with UNLV as a bouncy 6’8 big man out of the NBA Global Academy program. After riding the bench most of his freshman year, he transferred to Baylor, where he’s been an admirable replacement for Freddie Gillespie in the middle.

Like Teague, Adam Flagler is another transfer from the Big South. After a standout freshman season at Presbyterian College, he transferred into Baylor and sat out last season with Tchamwa Tchatchoua before becoming eligible.

Mark Vital committed to Baylor as a high school sophomore back in Sept. of 2013. Now a 24-year-old, fifth-year senior, the bruising forward is an indispensable part of the Bears’ defense while leading the team in rebounding two of the last three seasons.

Vital was rated as the No. 79 overall recruit in the high school class of 2016, which included players like Jayson Tatum who have already signed max extensions in the NBA. While one-and-done recruits still get all the hype in college basketball, there’s plenty of value in having players like Vital who know the system and can consistently execute coverages. Vital only averages five points per game and he’s undersized as a 6’5, 250-pound big man, but Drew can trust him in a way that wouldn’t be possible with a rotating door of more talented freshmen. In that sense, Vital is living proof of the truism that the key to success in college basketball is to ‘get old and stay old.’

Matthew Mayer is another example of Baylor’s slow-burn development. The No. 86 player in the class of 2018, Mayer has grown into a 6’9 forward who can stretch the floor (40 percent three-point shooting) and defend. Mayer has never started a game in three years of school, but has been mentioned as an undervalued NBA draft prospect. More than anything, Mayer and his now infamous mullet gives Baylor a player who embraces his role and plays it well.

If last year’s tournament wasn’t canceled, we could be talking about Baylor as a program making its second straight trip to the Final Four. This has been one of the very best teams in the sport for two straight seasons, with a 52-6 record to show for it. Just because Baylor wasn’t built with elite recruits doesn’t mean it lacks elite talent.

Mitchell’s improvement as a three-point shooter — from 32 percent last season to 45 percent this season — has dramatically raised his NBA chances. After a torrid tournament run, he’s now getting hyped as a potential lottery pick despite the fact that he’ll be a 23-year-old rookie. His combination of incredible burst and lockdown point of attack defense on smaller guards has fueled his rise. We’ve also had Butler projected as a first round pick all year for his ability to hit threes and run an offense.

Baylor is a great college basketball team by any definition. Drew built this program from the ground up, and has found creative new avenues to thrive at a time when so many of the sport’s traditional powers struggled to keep pace. There’s only one achievement this Baylor team is missing for a storybook ending. It takes two more wins to get there.