When Beaudine found Coach Art Briles, formerly of Houston, in 2008, it was the final piece of the awakening. With deep roots in Texas high school football, an innovative offensive mind and Griffin, Briles transformed the program. But when he took the job, his own daughter asked, “Dad, what are you doing?”

The faithful descended on Baylor University earlier this month, their cars stalled in traffic on University Parks Drive.

They came for another athletic extravaganza, a smorgasbord of sport that featured three nationally ranked teams (women’s and men’s basketball and equestrian), one that is still undefeated (women’s basketball) and one that is 6-2 (baseball). Here, at the world’s largest Baptist university, they no longer view such dates as unusual. Now, they call them Saturday.

This particular Saturday ended with Brittney Griner, the best player on the best women’s basketball team in perhaps the most successful (and surprising) athletic department in the country, falling on her back, performing snow angels in the green-and-gold confetti covering the court. Minutes later, her coach, Kim Mulkey, felt it necessary to remind the crowd that Big 12 championships, like the one the Lady Bears had secured, are difficult to obtain.

How life has changed. In a city scarred by the deadly 1993 confrontation between federal agents and the Branch Davidian group, at a university marred by decades of athletic ineptitude, where a former basketball player killed his former teammate in 2003, it can now be suggested that Baylor sports fans are spoiled by success.

To wit: Baylor has Griner, the Heisman Trophy winner (Robert Griffin III) and a potential N.B.A. lottery pick (Perry Jones III). Collectively, they went 40-0 from early November to mid-January, when at least 10 Baylor sports teams were nationally ranked.

The old-timers see this not as a renaissance, but an awakening. One regent, the prominent lobbyist Buddy Jones, said: “We like to use biblical analogies, and this is a year of biblical proportions. As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture. We spent 40 years wandering the wilderness. I hope this is our exit.”

Ian McCaw, athletic director: “Someone tapped me on the shoulder at a national meeting and said, You have the No. 1 athletic department in the country right now.”

Dave Campbell attended his first Baylor football game in 1937. He grew up here, went to Baylor, was the sports editor for the local paper and started Texas Football magazine. Campbell is unofficially Baylor’s athletic historian, and he believes, unequivocally, “this is the golden age of Baylor sports.”

History provides little, if any, competition. Baylor boosters like to note that their university, created in 1845, is older than the state of Texas, its traditions — a ban on dancing until 1996, required classes in Christian scripture — passed down for generations.

When Coach Grant Teaff arrived in 1972, he found the football program “the absolute worst place you could ever think of going in America.” The stadium, with its old wooden seats and worn grass field, was “horrible.” The weight program consisted of one universal gym machine. When possible, Teaff avoided showing the facilities to recruits.
Baylor played in the Southwest Conference, where Teaff won a title, somehow, in 1974. Teaff proved that Baylor, centrally located in the fertile recruiting grounds of Texas, along the scenic Brazos River, could compete. Yet he noticed the same mentality that once plagued Baylor, a private university smaller in size and budget than its competitors, resurface after he left in 1992.

Michael Johnson, the Olympic track gold medalist and Baylor graduate, said he felt that mentality on campus, not from the track program, which Clyde Hart deftly shaped into an unlikely power, but elsewhere. “Because Baylor is a great school, with high standards, athletic expectations weren’t high,” Johnson said. “Like, we’re little Baylor in this big sports world.”

Baylor practically sneaked into the Big 12 Conference in 1996. Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas and a 1954 Baylor graduate, is often credited with pushing through her alma mater, a theory John Fainter, her chief of staff, dismissed.

Regardless, Baylor did little to prove its worth. The Bears won six conference football games in their first nine Big 12 seasons. Walter Abercrombie, Baylor’s leading career rusher and an athletic department employee, recalled games when “it seemed like teams scored on every possession.” He added: “Imagine year after year after year seeing your program just get demoralized, embarrassed. Opposing teams looked at us like, oh, that’s a win. They were lining up to schedule us.”

Drayton McLane, former board of regents chairman, once owner of the Houston Astros: “Given everything that happened, it’s magical how all this came together.”

The awakening started before rock bottom, one piece at a time, as numerous elements converged like a Gut Pack, the infamous meal (brisket, sausage, beans, cheese, onions, pickles and jalapenos, over a bed of Fritos) served at Vitek’s BBQ.

In 1995, Baylor’s athletic budget was $7.5 million. Teams at other Big 12 universities spent more. It was easier, according to two members of that administration, to make excuses than spend money. One said: “Baylor created, for itself, an identity crisis. The theme was: save money, wait till next year — and we’ve got great academics!”

Under the university president Robert Sloan, Baylor began to spend. It built the athletic complexes that now line University Parks Drive. Athletic Director Tom Stanton hired Mulkey for women’s basketball and Matt Knoll for men’s tennis, and each won a national championship, the first two in Baylor’s history. Although coaches once used Baylor as a springboard to better jobs, both stayed, buoyed by the increased commitment.

Then came 2003 and one of the worst scandals ever in college sports.

In June, Patrick Dennehy went missing. In July, his former teammate, Carlton Dotson, was charged with murder. In August, Stanton and Coach Dave Bliss, once considered among the best hires in Baylor history, resigned. By June 2005, Dotson had been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Baylor received five years of probation, reduced scholarships and was banned from nonconference play in 2005-6.

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