The Background That Shapes Dave Aranda, Baylor’s New Head Coach

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Quiet and cerebral, the Bears’ hire has a defensive mind and a Mexican heritage few know about.

Dave Aranda misses the tamales. While others feast on the usual American holiday treats—turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes and green been casserole—Aranda and his family ate tamales. And a lot of them. “It’s weird having Christmas without tamales,” he says in an interview last month with Sports Illustrated. “I would be crushing tamales throughout the lead up to Christmas.”

Baylor’s new head football coach is unique in many ways. Aranda was one of the most unusual longtime defensive coordinators in college football—quiet and cerebral, not a yeller or screamer. He never even played college football, and he originally wanted to enlist in the Navy. But nothing separates Aranda from others in the high-profile coaching fraternity more than his heritage—he’s Mexican American.

Decades after being raised as a Spanish-speaking child in southern California, Aranda landed his first head coaching job at a place with a sprawling Hispanic and Latino community deep in the heart of Texas. The nation’s highest paid assistant is now leading the Big 12 runner-up Bears, replacing Matt Rhule and ending a four-year stretch as LSU’s defensive coordinator. Three days after helping lead the Tigers to a national championship victory over Clemson in New Orleans, Aranda emerged as a top candidate at Baylor, a move SI first reported on Thursday. It came only after the school flirted with Virginia Tech coach Justin Fuente and interviewed Cajuns coach Billy Napier.

So what are the Bears getting in Aranda? Many in the industry call him one of the game’s best defensive minds, a 43-year old who captained some of the most successful defensive units in football at LSU and before that for three years at Wisconsin. Because of his cerebral nature, Aranda developed a host of nicknames over the years, most notably The Professor and The Defensive Coordinator Whisper. He’s a football nerd who will often talk about the “math of football” while babbling in technical jargon. Aranda’s scheme is built around “dictating” the terms of the game, a more offensive and attacking approach to defense.

Aside from football, Aranda is a married father of three with a background that few know about: He’s a minority, a man who embraced his Mexican roots in an interview last month with SI. Aranda says both of his parents’ families originated from the Guadalajara area, a six-hour drive west of Mexico City. He grew up speaking a mixture of English and Spanish. Can he speak Spanish today? “Yeah. Cuss words,” he laughs. “That’s all I remember.” Aranda is the 12th minority head football coach among the 65 Power 5 teams, it is believed. He’ll reside in Waco, a place in which about one-third of the population is either Hispanic or Latino. It’s similar to back in his home of Redlands, Calif., a quiet community at the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

Paul and Marguerite Aranda raised two sons, Dave and Mike, and both got into coaching. Mike is an assistant basketball coach in Redlands. The boys didn’t grow up in an affluent home. Marguerite worked in the social security office, and Paul was a member of a prison parole board. Dave remembers spending hours after school at the YMCA while his parents worked. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” he says. “I just remember all the different people that are hanging out at the YMCA during the day. There would be so many different groups of people: the head bangers, the people who would study, the jocks, there would be the Mexican guys who didn’t speak English. I knew all of those people and could talk to them. I was really quiet always but could talk to them all. I cherished that experience.”