The Rebirth of Bobcat football

TXST FOOTBALL

This is the first of a multipart series on the 2005 Bobcat football season and its impact on Texas State University 20 years later.

There are moments in history that alter the timeline forever – the proverbial butterfly effect. One action instigates the next leading to an entirely different future. For Texas State University, the 2005 football season is one of those moments in time.

Since making the jump to Division I football in 1984 – even though the team competed at the lower Football Championship Series level as opposed to going to bowl games in the FBS – the Bobcats captured only four winning seasons prior to 2005. The highest mark was a 7-4 overall record in 1984, 1991 and 2000.

Fan apathy was also on the downward trend.

Drawing a season average of more than 10,900 in attendance from 1981 through 1984, which included two Division II national championships, Texas State would only top the mark twice during the 2000 season, with an average attendance of 12,417, and in 2004, averaging 11,164. Dalton Sweat, a regional editor of the San Marcos Daily Record and a Texas State graduate, was involved in the process of the university transitioning to FBS. He also had first-hand knowledge of what the average football experience was like prior to 2005.

“I have watched games in Bobcat Stadium with dozens of people, maybe hundreds, but definitely less than thousands,” Sweat said. “Having gone through those times, it makes the years when it’s up that much more special.”

Texas State Director of Athletics Don Coryell first worked with the university during the 2004 season. Upon seeing the gameday atmosphere, Coryell knew something needed to change.

“We played Florida Atlantic, who is transitioning to FBS football,” Coryell said. “It might’ve been my first football game, one of my first ones, and I remember kind of walking out and saying ‘We’ve got to work on this atmosphere a little bit here.’” Though the Bobcats were on a lull, there was still the belief Texas State could recapture the magic of the Jim Wacker national championships, which Bill Culhane, a former Texas State sports broadcaster from 1994 through 2019, could sense from many of the fanbase who still remembered the glory days of the early 1980s.

“My first season was in 1994, which at the time seemed far removed from national championships under Jim Wacker,” Culhane said. “I crossed paths with many people who either played on those teams, were fans or were on the staff. There was still a thought that Bobcat fans knew what winning football was.”

In 2003, Texas State transitioned away from the name of Southwest Texas. On the football field, the Bobcats were under new leadership in Head Coach Manny Matsakis. In an attempt to extend Texas State’s recruiting footprint, Matsakis brought in several transfers into the program from across the nation. One of those transfers was a quarterback from Dallas Adamson High School who transferred from the University of Houston in Barrick Nealy.

“I didn’t really know much about the place to be honest with you, transferring in from the University of Houston,” Nealy said. “But a few coaches from that Houston staff got hired there, so I just kinda started doing my homework. I just felt like it was a place that had a lot of potential; [it was] closer to home, and I’d have the opportunity to go in and play right away; because, at the time, it was one [FCS], so you didn’t have to sit out a year.”

During the 2003 season, Nealy became the first quarterback in program history to pass for over 3,000 yards and throw 21 touchdown passes in a single season. The Bobcats finished the 2003 season with a 5-7 overall record, their best mark since 2000.

However, controversy struck the program in January of 2004.

Texas State reported 12 NCAA violations, leading to the university to fire Matsakis and Athletic Director Greg LaFluer.

Mike Davis, who was a two-time president of the Bobcat Athletic Association at the time of the firing, didn’t mince words about Matsakis.

“Manny was an arrogant egotistical individual,” Davis said at the time in an interview with the San Marcos Daily Record. “In my opinion, he had very little respect for people that didn’t see things he did. What got him in trouble is that he was only concerned with his thoughts, and he had no concern about what others felt about the program.

“It wasn’t just Manny’s arrogance and ego but he wasn’t respected by the Texas high school coaches. When he said he wanted to go to California and New York to recruit, he was alienating himself from the high school coaches in Texas.”

Though many celebrated the firing of Matsakis at the time, Nealy felt different.

“Manny was really working in a way that’s really similar to guys now,” Nealy said. “It wasn’t a transfer portal but man he brought in a lot of guys from across the country at a lot of Division I schools at that time. … We knew we had the talent, [but we] didn’t have the structure that we really needed at the time.”

With the program now directionless, Texas State and the new administration – soon to be led by Larry Teis – turned to one of their own.

David Bailiff played under Wacker from 1977 through 1980, capturing a conference title in his senior year making the transition to coaching. Bailiff coached on the defensive staff from 1988 through 1991 before returning in 1997 where he became the defensive coordinator before leaving again in 2000.

As the defensive coordinator for Gary Patterson and the TCU Horned Frogs, Bailiff helped the program capture the CUSA title 2002. After an 11-2 season in 2003 with the Horned Frogs, Bailiff got the call to help his alma mater.

“It was in disarray,” Bailiff said. “They’ve had a lot of issues in the football program, in the department with the Athletic Director and the football coach. When I took the job, there was no athletic director and they were still searching for an athletic director. They had offered me the job the year before when I was in TCU. This time around, the gentleman named Dr. [Jim] Studer when he called said, ‘Your university needs you to come back, and we think you’re probably the only one who can fix the problems around here.’” For Nealy, Bailiff brought stability the team desperately needed.

“Bailiff just came in and just structured that thing,” Nealy said. “He got the most out of us. We knew we were talented, but we didn’t know what was going to happen in that 2005 season.”

The 2004 season saw the team improve from the year before. The Bobcats finished the year 5-6, including a one possession loss to Baylor, but went 32 in conference play, finishing behind Sam Houston and Northwestern State. During Bailiff’s first year as head coach, the Bobcat alumni brought back Texas State walk-on Randy Moshier, who later became a senior captain in 2005 after being cut from the team in 2003.

“Coach Bailiff’s first year was a little bit of an unknown,” Moshier said. “He inherited a lot of transfers that Matsakis had brought, so it was just kind of a hodgepodge of guys that were sort of left over. Obviously, the transfer portal was a little different back then than it is now … He had some pieces, but I don’t think we really knew what we had.”

Little did people know, 2004 was just a preview of what was yet to come.

Part two of this series will be run in the Sunday, Aug. 2 issue of the San Marcos Daily Record.