Baylor athletic director Tom Stanton fired football coach Kevin Steele on Sunday afternoon, then returned a half-hour later to ask him to coach the last three games of the season. We'll get to Stanton's skills of persuasion another time, but Steele had all but decided to walk out the door and go home.

"Nothing about me wanted to (stay)," he said.

Then Steele called Tom Osborne, for whom Steele had been an assistant for six seasons at Nebraska. The congressman characteristically rose above the emotion of the moment.

"For those kids," said Osborne, "you need to do it."

	Kevin Steele was just 9-33, but making progress at Baylor.

Steele stayed because it is the right thing to do, and Steele is pretty good about doing the right things.

"Going home is the easiest thing to do, but then I talked with Coach Osborne and I started thinking about the kids," Steele said. "It's a good teaching opportunity. I'm going to handle it with class and with dignity."

Once the season is over, though, he needs to get as far from Waco as possible. Baylor can't screw things up enough, and firing Steele is the best possible example of the school's ineptitude.

Ineptitude isn't the biggest reason for Baylor's lack of success. You can't blame anyone for having too much ambition, but that may be Baylor's biggest mistake. The small Baptist university is a welterweight trying to climb up the heavyweight charts. That Baylor is even in the Big 12 is an accident of politics. If Baylor grads Ann Richards and Bob Bullock hadn't been Governor and Lt. Governor, respectively, in 1994 when Texas and Texas A&M decided to jailbreak out of the Southwest Conference and merge with the Big Eight, Baylor never would have been invited.

All the new league has done is highlight the substantial difference in resources between the Baylors and the Texases of the world. For instance, Steele had a football budget of $5.2 million, roughly one-quarter of what the Big 12 powers spend. The season ticket base of 13,000 would fill about one-sixth of Kyle Field in College Station.

But the lack of resources doesn't excuse the lack of judgment that the Baylor hierarchy has displayed. Baylor fired Chuck Reedy after he spent one season in the Big 12. The school hired Dave Roberts and fired him after two seasons.

Stanton appeared to get it right when he hired Steele. Steele is smart, personable, organized and a devout Christian -- in other words, a perfect fit for Baylor. The school dumped him three games short of four seasons. The next coach will be the fourth in seven years.

Anyone in Waco interested in a reference on how to build a Big 12 program doesn't need to look far. Kansas State hired Bill Snyder and got out of his way. Iowa State hired Dan McCarney and got out of his way. He endured six losing seasons before he had a winning one, but that same Cyclone program just qualified for its third consecutive bowl game.

No question that Steele has made mistakes, the most public of which was the loss to UNLV in his first season. All the Bears had left to do was put a knee down and win, 24-21. Instead, Steele acceded to the players' wishes and allowed them to try and score from the one-yard line. A fumble, a length-of-the-field return that will forever stand among the great plays in UNLV history, and Steele had been humiliated.

His sense of humor, however, remained intact. When someone asked him the next day if the sun had indeed risen after such a disaster, Steele said, "Yes, and I was awake to see it."

But it is also easy to see progress. The team has gotten better every season. Yes, Steele is 9-33. But McCarney was 8-34 and Snyder was 17-25 after 42 games at Iowa State and K-State, respectively. Sure, the Bears are 3-6 this season, and five of those losses came by at least 34 points, but Steele is playing mostly young players.

Baylor would have been served well by continuity. Instead, the university made a knee-jerk decision that will placate the alumni, at least until the next coach comes in and starts over.

Once again, Baylor will take one step backward before it takes two steps forward. The problem is that the university never gives its coach enough time to move forward. So it is that the Bears keep going in reverse.

Ivan Maisel is a senior writer for ESPN.com. E-mail him at ivan.maisel@espn3.com.