Today it was announced that the late Mike Leach, the former head football coach at Texas Tech, Washington State, and Mississippi State, an innovator in college football and character persona number one in college football, would now be eligible to be in the College Football Hall of Fame. As someone who still is in absolute disgust about the way Tech did him and the corrupt regents along with a hypocritical helicopter Dad and his entitled demon seed son, and will always be until Tech apologizes for how they handled that situation and pays his family what they owed Leach, ill never truly be “over it.” However, that got me thinking that we don’t exactly have clean hands on the way we ended terms with a Coach who deserved better. It got me thinking about David Bailiff, one of the most gracious Men to ever coach in Commerce, Texas and the raw deal he got.

David Bailiff’s exit from then Texas A&M-Commerce was not handled well for a plethora of reasons. Bailiff took us the national quarterfinals in his first year, navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and even insisted on playing during 2020, though he was opposed by the “out of abundance of caution” crowd, lost his starting quarterback and golden goose in Miklo Smalls to injury and still had the Lions in contention till the very end in 2021, and of course was totally put behind the 8 ball in his third year and final year when ETAMU made the move to NCAA Division I.

When the move to Division I started, I felt that if anyone could see it through, it was Bailiff. However, he was put in a no win situation. The fans in Commerce had expected him to win and win big. In his first two seasons had a record of 18-7 and had national title expectations. He brought with him Miklo Smalls and everything seemed like 2020 was the “All Roads lead to McKinney” year, but COVID hit and Bailiff wanted to play, but the Presidents in the NCAA DIVISION II Athletic Committee decided not to play and Bailiff did not like that one bit, and he fought like heck for his student athletes.

Bailiff was a gentleman if there ever was one, and as I think about how his first year in Division I went, he really over-performed. It was one thing to whack schools like Lincoln and North American, but was another thing to beat Southeastern Louisiana (who would win the conference title that year), Houston Christian, and McNeese, along with holding Incarnate Word to their lowest offensive output of their season. Then he had games he should have and would have won had he had the services of Eric Rodriguez, and those games were Sam Houston, Tennessee Tech, Tennessee State, and Nicholls. If E-Rod doesn’t go down, Bailiff wins 9 games in his first year in Division I and goes 4-2 in Southland play. However, when you get an Ohio State transfer who need not be named but was nothing more than an empty set of pads that quit on you 3 games into the season, forces you to play two tight ends at Quarterback, an administration that refused to fully fund his program, an administration that would not even hire an athletic director and have two interim AD’s that actually worked against him and would not pay him for an extension, not to mention assistant coaches that were secretly trying to undermine his efforts and trying to get him fired and lose the locker room, you are fighting one heck of a battle.

I remember towards the end of the 2022 season when the offense was getting so bad and putrid to watch, and I thought to myself that Bailiff might not have what it took to run an offense that would help us compete, until I realized how little I knew about the situation behind the scenes and how much trust Bailiff had in his assistants, and how often assistants can make and break a team and get head coaches fired. It makes me feel ashamed that I ever felt that way about him, because perhaps the best thing for this site was for him to lend us credibility when half baked yokels, bloviating blowhards, and brownnosed characters in the administration were coming for us and trying to tell us what we were doing was wrong. Bailiff and Russ had a great relationship, and I still have his cell phone number in my phone and sometimes wish I could give Coach Bailiff a call and tell him how sorry I am about how my alma mater handled his situation and how few tools they gave him to have success on the FCS level. After every post game interview, Bailiff said “thank you guys so much for coming and covering us. Keep at it, we appreciate what you guys do!”

And we appreciated what he did for us.

None the less, the man got us believing that we could not only survive, but thrive in the post-Carthel era, and he served our school with dignity and excellence.

So here are your flowers, David Bailiff, and I hope you will accept them for all you did in Commerce, and I hope you believe in better late than never.