The story behind the TCU coach who turned in his own team to the NCAA
Kenneth Davis shed more tears than he cares to admit 37 years ago when he was told he was being suspended from TCU‘s football team.
He may shed a few more tears Saturday, tears of joy, when he sees his alma mater playing the kind of high-stakes game he and his teammates dreamed about before the unthinkable happened.
Just prior to the second game of the 1985 season, a season filled with promise for the Horned Frogs, TCU coach Jim Wacker turned in his own team to the NCAA after learning that several players, including Davis, had been accepting illegal payments from boosters. Davis was coming off a season in which he had finished fifth in the Heisman Trophy voting after rushing for 1,611 yards and scoring 17 touchdowns.
“Yep, the same thing that’s legal now,” Davis told ESPN, referencing NIL. “It was devastating. I just cried and couldn’t quit crying. I think today that I’m still not over it because there was so much we could have done and would have done. They just brushed us out of there for what everybody else was doing in the Southwest Conference back then. And I mean everybody, a lot of it much worse at other schools.
“We didn’t set up any of it. The boosters set it up. They came to us. What kid isn’t going to accept that money if they’re offering it to you, especially the kids coming from tougher backgrounds?
“It was a hard time, not just for us, but for a lot of people who loved TCU.”
As dark as those days were for Davis and the Frog Nation, he said it would all be worth it to see TCU beat Michigan on Saturday in the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl, then finish off this dream season with a victory in the national championship game Jan. 9.
“They get a chance to do what I always wanted to do, to win a national championship, and maybe this is finally our time,” Davis said. “I’ll always wonder what we could have done because we had the right players, the right coaches, the right team, the right everything.”
They also had a head coach who was anything but conventional. He was deeply committed to doing what he felt was the right thing — even if that meant dropping a dime on his own team.
“Not many coaches would have done that, then or now,” said former TCU athletic director Frank Windegger, who will turn 89 next month. “What a hard decision, but the right decision despite everything we had to dig out of after that. It was a different time in college football. But Jim was determined to stand by what he had been preaching, that we weren’t going to try to win games by breaking the rules.”
Wacker, the son of a Lutheran preacher, died in 2003 at the age of 66 from cancer. Those closest to him said he was tormented by the aftermath of the scandal, but not by his actions.
“Dad never regretted his decision to do what he did because that decision had already been made,” said oldest son Mike Wacker, who played basketball at Texas and coached basketball for 37 years, recently retiring from Texas Lutheran University. “The last thing he was going to be was a hypocrite. He had said very publicly that he wasn’t going to buy players. He didn’t say it once. He said it a million times. He genuinely believed they could win at TCU without cheating.
“What Dad did regret was how much that decision adversely impacted so many people’s lives. He never wanted that to happen.”
Seven players were suspended, some of whom may have had potential pro careers stunted, and there was shame and embarrassment across the board at TCU. All after Wacker, who had come to the school from the NAIA and Division II ranks, had revived a moribund program that had 16 losing seasons in the previous 17 years before his arrival.
Tom Mueller was Wacker’s defensive coordinator and worked with him for 21 years. To this day, Mueller believes some people in the upper administration at TCU failed Wacker because they weren’t completely truthful with him when he took the job about whether players were getting paid.
“There was a meeting, and he looked the people in that room right in the eyes and said, ‘I need to know if we’re cheating because that’s not the way we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it the right way,'” Mueller recounted. “Maybe Jim was naive, but he believed you could win without cheating and was assured that wouldn’t be the case while he was the coach.”
Those close to Wacker, who was the eternal optimist with his catch phrases like “Unbeleev-able,” said he was surprised and disappointed by how harshly the NCAA penalized TCU even with Wacker being so cooperative. Wacker was insistent on turning over all the information the school uncovered from a payment plan that had been launched by boosters, including trustee Dick Lowe, before Wacker was hired. Lowe, a Texas oil man, died in 2020. He told the Orange County Register in 2010 that the payments were “stupid” and were born out of frustration because “everybody else was doing it and we were getting our asses kicked.”
Much to Wacker’s chagrin, the NCAA hardly took it easy on TCU, which was hit with a one-year bowl ban, the loss of 35 scholarships over two years and the forfeiture of its 1983 and 1984 television revenue. Those sanctions were a precursor to SMU receiving the so-called death penalty because of recruiting violations. The Mustangs had to shut down their program in 1987 and 1988. The sanctions against the two schools were part of a series of events that in many ways were the beginning of the end of the Southwest Conference.
“Jim went as far as to find out when NCAA investigators were coming to town and would send a car to pick them up at the airport,” said Bob DeBesse, TCU’s quarterbacks coach at the time. “Jim just felt by doing the right thing, calling the NCAA and handing over everything, that the NCAA would also do the right thing. But, no, it was just the opposite.
“We always said that SMU got the death penalty, but that we got life because we had to keep playing through impossible sanctions.”
In a flash, all the momentum of the TCU football program was gone. The Horned Frogs went 8-4 in 1984 and played in their first bowl game in 19 years. But over the next eight years, they would have just one winning season. It was 15 more years before they would make it back into the AP Top 25. And with the Southwest Conference’s demise on the horizon, TCU ended up bouncing around from one conference to another (WAC, Conference USA and Mountain West) until finally latching on with the Big 12 in 2012.
Davis, who played nine seasons in the NFL with the Green Bay Packers and Buffalo Bills, has talked very little publicly over the years about the way it ended for him at TCU. The same goes for the other six players suspended for taking cash from boosters: Marvin Foster, Gary Spann, Gerald Taylor, Egypt Allen, Darron Turner and Ron Zell Brewer, who died in 2010.
“What happened happened, and there was a lot of anger over it at the time, but we’re all still Frogs,” said Davis. “A lot of the guys from that team keep in touch.”
Kevin Dean was a defensive end on the 1985 team and has remained close with Davis and some of the others who were suspended.
“Some people say they were suspended. I’d say they were more sacrificial lambs,” said Dean, who organizes get-togethers to watch some of the TCU games on television in the Dallas area. “Those guys paid a heavy price, but they’re not bitter. What happened in the past doesn’t define you, and TCU as a university didn’t turn its back on them. Most of them got degrees, and they’ve all been very successful.”
As the SMU investigation heated up in 1985 — and with Texas A&M and Houston also in the NCAA’s crosshairs — the NCAA got word that something might be going on at TCU after talking to other coaches and recruits, and informed TCU officials that it was coming to campus to take a look.
Wacker had already angered some fellow Southwest Conference coaches by sending out a letter soon after he took the job imploring them to clean up their acts in recruiting. Part of that letter, dated March 3, 1983, read: “The major violations — the blatant buying of athletes — is what must come to an end, or we will self-destruct before it is all over. At TCU, we did control our alumni this past recruiting season. We did not buy one athlete. It can be done if we let the alumni know that we will personally turn them in to the NCAA if they are involved in any illegal recruiting practices.”
Mike Wacker said one thing his father regretted was sending that letter because it immediately turned off other coaches in the conference and painted him as holier-than-thou even though that was not his intention.
“I think it became: ‘Who is this guy from Southwest Texas State, a Division II school, coming in here and telling us what we should be doing?'” Mike Wacker said. “That’s one he wished he could have back.”
The letter sparked a well-documented feud between Wacker and then-Texas A&M coach Jackie Sherrill, who called for an onside kick in the fourth quarter in a 53-6 rout of TCU at Fort Worth in the final game of the 1985 season. The following year, Sherrill had the Aggies go for a 2-point conversion late in a 74-10 rout of the depleted Horned Frogs.
Two years after writing that letter, Wacker’s worst fears came true. It was the Thursday before the trip to Kansas State in Week 2 of the 1985 season, and Wacker had given his team an impassioned speech about how proud he was that TCU was having success without cheating. He knew the NCAA was about to pay a visit to campus and wanted to make sure he had nothing to hide.
“Coach was convinced that any payments that had been going on before he got there had stopped, and in his mind, we were an open book for the NCAA and anybody else,” said David Rascoe, the quarterback on that 1985 team. “He was exactly who he said he was, nothing fraudulent about him.”
Tom Perry was the TCU running backs coach. He suspected that some players on the team might be getting money from boosters simply by looking at their cars, expensive boots and jewelry.
When Wacker quizzed his assistant coaches that Thursday about whether players were receiving extra benefits, Perry found himself in an impossible situation. He said he was one of two assistants in the room to raise his hand when asked by Wacker if there was reason to believe that boosters were still paying players.
Later that day, Davis met with Perry and asked if there was any way Wacker would know if players were indeed getting paid. That’s when Perry went to Wacker with the bad news.
“He just kept saying, ‘Why did you have to tell me? Why did you have to tell me?'” Perry recalled. “I know he was hurting because of how outspoken he had been that we weren’t cheating, and I don’t think Jim was complicit in any way. But I was doing what he’d asked us to do. So, yes, I was pissed at the way he reacted. I just think he was one of those guys who always thought the best of everybody. He was that naive, like he’d just fallen off the turnip truck.”
One by one, the players involved admitted they had been taking money from boosters. Six players were suspended late that Thursday night. Wacker went to meet with the chancellor, called the NCAA and conference officials and also alerted some in the media.
Longtime Dallas television personality Dale Hansen broke the story and remembers interviewing Wacker sometime around midnight on campus after doing his newscast that evening.
“There were some in the media who thought Jim was a fraud, but my argument, and I still stand by this, is that Jim knew they were getting paid when he took the job because everybody in the Southwest Conference was getting paid,” Hansen said. “But Jim also made it very clear to everybody at TCU, ‘From this day forward, it stops.'”
Hansen was doing a regular TV show back then with former Dallas Cowboys receiver Butch Johnson, and they showed a clip from Wacker’s introductory news conference where he said, “Wacker don’t cheat and Wacker don’t pay.”
Johnson looked at Hansen on the air and quipped, “Well, Wacker ain’t winning no football games.”
Gil LeBreton was a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during that time and was on the team’s charter flight to Kansas State. He said TCU and Wacker wanted to be as transparent as possible and offered the seat.
“It was awful, like being on a flying funeral procession,” LeBreton said. “You could hear players just openly bawling and crying with their heads down in their laps. Their faces were red, like they’d been up all night. It was a surreal scene.”
Somehow, TCU won the game, and the Star-Telegram’s headline the next day read: TCU wins anyway.
The number of suspended players grew to seven after the Kansas State game when Brewer admitted that he, too, had been taking money.
“He felt badly for his teammates and didn’t want them to fall on the sword for something he knew he was also doing,” Dean said. “That tells you a lot about him and a lot about the brotherhood on that team.”
Wacker had his supporters on campus after disclosing the violations, particularly among students. A group of them held up “Wacker Backer” signs in the stands of home games. But not everyone was onboard with Wacker’s decision, particularly some of the more prominent power brokers. That was never more apparent than in 1991, the final year of Wacker’s contract, when he guided the Frogs to a 7-4 finish after they struggled through six straight losing seasons.
“We had [officials from] several bowls in attendance at our last game and knew we were going to one of them after we beat David Klingler and Houston in a great game,” Mueller said. “We’re all standing around in the locker room waiting to see where we were going, and Jim gets the call telling him the administration had declined a bowl bid. It was obvious Jim no longer had the support he needed. He didn’t want to leave TCU, but Minnesota came after him and he knew the time was right to leave.”
Wacker coached at Minnesota from 1992 to 1996, resigning after five losing seasons.
Davis said he rarely talked with Wacker after leaving TCU, although Davis said he doesn’t begrudge his former coach for going to the NCAA.
“It was his job to do what he did and to protect the team, and that’s what he did,” Davis said. “I understand and respect him for that. I don’t have nothing against him.”
Perry never coached college football again after leaving TCU, but went on to earn a doctorate degree. He hopes what people remember most from that time is the way Wacker came in and turned around the program and “did it his way by getting kids to believe.”
Mike Wacker said his dad will undoubtedly be smiling down from above when the ball is kicked off Saturday afternoon.
“He’d love this team,” Mike Wacker said. “And you know how he loved crazy things, all the rhyming and joking around and coming up with nicknames.
“The thing he’d really love is the Hypnotoad thing.”
“We know it hasn’t always been easy for TCU, and that’s going back a long way,” current TCU quarterback and Heisman finalist Max Duggan said. “There’s been a lot of tough times, so we’re playing for those guys and those teams as much as we are for anybody.”
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Bill Connelly
After months of meeting to discuss things to discuss at future meetings, the people in charge of the College Football Playoff actually made a decision on Thursday, and it was one we’ve assumed they’d make for a while. After last year’s 12-team CFP gave byes to the four most highly ranked conference champions, this year’s will not.
Conference commissioners voted to go to a straight seeding format (with five spots still reserved for conference champions) in 2025.
There are still plenty of things to discuss regarding what the CFP will look like in 2026 and beyond — and good lord, don’t even get me started on how much I don’t like where we’re probably headed in that regard — but with the 2025 season starting in less than 100 days, we at least know how things will take shape this fall. Here are a few thoughts regarding these changes.
A 2024 simulation
To see what something might look like in the future, my first step is always to revisit the past. Last year’s 12-teamer, the first-ever genuine tournament at the highest level of college football, indeed handed out byes to conference champions and gave us the weird visual of having two different numbers listed next to the teams in the bracket.
Boise State, for instance, was ranked ninth in the overall CFP rankings, but the Broncos got the No. 3 seed as the third-ranked conference champ. Arizona State was simultaneously 12th and fourth. Granted, the NFL does something similar, giving the top three seeds in each conference to the winners of each individual division (which occasionally gives us odd pairings such as 9-8 Tampa Bay hosting 11-6 Philadelphia in 2023 or the 10-7 Los Angeles Rams hosting 14-3 Minnesota in 2024). But from the start, it was clear there was some dissatisfaction with this approach. And when both BSU and ASU lost in the quarterfinals — all four conference champions did, actually — it became abundantly clear that this was going to change. It just took about five months to actually happen.
Regardless, let’s look at how the 2024 playoff would have taken shape with straight seeding instead of conference-champ byes.
First round
12 Clemson at 5 Notre Dame (SP+ projection: Irish by 13.1, 79.4% win probability)
11 Arizona State at 6 Ohio State (OSU by 24.2*, 93.6% win probability)
10 SMU at 7 Tennessee (Tennessee by 7.0, 66.9% win probability)
9 Boise State at 8 Indiana (Indiana by 12.5, 78.3% win probability)
(* Here’s your reminder that SP+ really didn’t trust Arizona State much last season, primarily because the Sun Devils were a pretty average team early in the season. At 5-2 with a number of close wins and a sketchy-looking loss at Cincinnati without injured quarterback Sam Leavitt, they entered November ranked in the 50s. While they certainly rose during their late-year hot streak, they finished the year only 35th. They were genuinely excellent late in the season — just ask Texas — but they were 6-1 in one-score games heading into the CFP, and they were lucky to reach November with the Big 12 title still within reach.)
In last year’s actual first round, the four home teams (Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State and Texas) were projected as favorites by an average of 7.2 points per SP+. The average spread was Home Team -8.9. The results were actually much more lopsided than that, and that probably wouldn’t be any different with the matchups above — here, home teams are projected favorites by an average of 14.2. Changing to straight seeding wouldn’t have made the first round more competitive.
Assuming all four home teams win in this simulation, that gives us the following quarterfinals.
Quarterfinals
Rose Bowl: 1 Oregon vs. 8 Indiana (SP+ projection: Oregon by 5.9, 64.4% win probability)
Fiesta Bowl: 4 Penn State vs. 5 Notre Dame (PSU by 0.7, 51.8% win probability)
Sugar Bowl: 3 Texas vs. 6 Ohio State (OSU by 7.1, 67.1% win probability)
Peach Bowl: 2 Georgia vs. 7 Tennessee (UGA by 2.4, 55.9% win probability)
Interestingly enough, we got two of these four matchups in real life, but they were the two semifinals — Ohio State’s 28-14 win over Texas in the Cotton Bowl and Notre Dame’s late 27-24 win over Penn State in the Orange Bowl. Now these games take place in New Orleans and Glendale, Arizona, respectively. We’ll conveniently project those results to remain the same. Meanwhile, SP+ says there’s only about a 36% chance that the other two projected favorites (Oregon and Georgia) both win, but we’ll roll with that.
Semifinals
Cotton Bowl: 1 Oregon vs. 5 Notre Dame (SP+ projection: Oregon by 2.1, 55.3% win probability)
Orange Bowl: 2 Georgia vs. 6 Ohio State (OSU by 6.8, 66.6% win probability)
With those win probabilities, there’s only about a 37% chance that both projected favorites win, and this time we’ll heed that and project an upset: Conveniently, we’ll say Notre Dame upsets Oregon, giving us the exact same Fighting Irish-Buckeyes title game we got in real life.
Final
5 Notre Dame vs. 6 Ohio State
Again, we saw this one.
Who would have benefited from this change?
In all, using my pre-CFP SP+ projections from December, here’s a comparison of what each team’s national title odds were heading into the tournament versus what they’d have looked like with straight seeding.
Not surprisingly, Arizona State’s and Boise State’s odds would have sunk without receiving a bye, but their title odds were minimal regardless. The teams that actually ended up hurt the most by the change would have been 2-seed Georgia, original 5-seed Texas and original 11-seed SMU. The main reason for the downshift in odds? They’d have all been placed on Ohio State’s side of the bracket. Meanwhile, Ohio State’s and Tennessee’s odds would have benefited from the simple fact that they would no longer be paired with unbeaten No. 1 Oregon in the Rose Bowl quarterfinal. Obviously Ohio State handled that challenge with aplomb, but the Buckeyes still had to ace that test, then win two more games to take the title.
Beyond Ohio State and Tennessee, both Indiana and Oregon would have seen their title odds improve a bit with straight seeding, though for different reasons. Indiana would have gotten a first-round home game instead of having to travel to South Bend, while Oregon would have avoided Ohio State until a potential finals matchup.
Takeaways
Good: The No. 5 seed isn’t quite as uniquely valuable now
We never got to see the 12-team playoff as originally envisioned, with six conference champions earning bids from a universe that featured five power conferences. Instead, between the announced adoption of the 12-team playoff and its actual arrival, the SEC officially added Oklahoma and Texas to its roster while the Big Ten, with help from the Big 12, cannibalized the Pac-12. With only four power conferences remaining, we ended up with only five conference champions guaranteed entry, and with the distribution of power getting further consolidated (we still have four power conferences, but it’s clearly a Power Two and Other Two), that left us with an awkward bracket.
For starters, the new power distribution meant that the No. 5 seed — almost certainly the higher-ranked team between the losers of the Big Ten and SEC championship games — would get an almost unfair advantage. As I wrote back in December, “the odds are pretty good that the teams earning the No. 4 and 12 seeds (aka the two lowest-ranked conference champs) will be the weakest teams in the field …. Texas, the top-ranked non-champion and 5-seed, is indeed pitted against what SP+ thinks are the No. 17 and No. 30 teams in the country and therefore has excellent odds of reaching the semifinals.”
As you see above, Texas actually entered the CFP with better title odds (17.2%) than Georgia (16.6%), a higher-ranked team in SP+ and the team that had just defeated the Longhorns in the SEC title game. In theory, giving a team a bye and asking them to win three games instead of four would be a massive advantage. But in practice Texas’ odds of winning two games (against Clemson and ASU) were better than Georgia’s odds of winning one (Notre Dame). That’s not particularly fair, is it?
Bad: Conference title games mean even less now
Making this change would have indeed given the SEC champion better title odds than the SEC runner-up. That’s good, but it comes with a cost. In the re-simulation above, you’ll notice that both the winners and losers of the SEC and Big Ten title games ended up with byes and top-four seeds. That means there were almost literally no stakes — besides a quest to avoid major injuries like what afflicted Georgia — in either game.
Meanwhile, in the ACC championship, SMU lost to Clemson but barely fell in the CFP rankings (and, more specifically, still got in) because the playoff committee didn’t want to punish the Mustangs for playing a 13th game while others around them in the rankings were already done at 12. Add to that the fact that the straight-seeding approach diminished the above title odds for four of the five conference champions in the field, and it leads you toward a pretty easy question: Why are we even playing these games?
Commissioners of the power conferences have pretty clearly had that in their minds as they’ve discussed a convoluted (and, in my own opinion, patently ridiculous) new playoff structure that hands multiple automatic bids to each of the top four conferences: up to four each for the SEC and Big Ten and likely two each for the ACC and Big 12. With this structure in place, they can drift from title games and toward multiple play-in games within each conference. I absolutely hate this idea — if you want to wreck the integrity of the regular season, nothing would do that faster than a 7-5 or 8-4 Big Ten team potentially stealing a bid from a 10-2 or 11-1 comrade that was vastly superior in the regular season — but you can at least understand why the commissioners themselves, facing a world with diminished conference title games (and always looking for more TV spectacles), would try to get creative in this regard.
Straight seeding doesn’t change all that much. Ohio State was given a harder title path last year than would have existed with straight seeding, but the Buckeyes cruised regardless, winning four games by a combined 70 points. Meanwhile, even with a bye, Boise State and Arizona State weren’t likely to win three games and go all the way. The team that best peaks in December and January will win 2025’s title just like it did in 2024, we’ll enjoy ourselves all the same, and we’ll be facing another change in 2026 no matter what.
The countdown toward 2025 continues.
IN CREPT WILLSON CONTRERAS, closer and closer to home plate, to the point that it started alarming his St. Louis Cardinals teammates. Contreras is in his first season as a first baseman, and even if the situation called for him to crash toward the plate — eighth inning, 1-0 lead, runners on first and second with no outs and Kansas City’s Jonathan India squaring to bunt on the first two pitches — Contreras stationed himself 51 feet away, like a bunt scarecrow, as if to invite a swing from someone who routinely hits baseballs more than 100 mph.
“Scoot back a little,” Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado hollered across the diamond. Cardinals coaches urged Contreras to do the same. He did not oblige their requests.
“I was afraid [India] was going to take a swing and kill him,” Cardinals starter Miles Mikolas said.
None of this surprised the Cardinals. Contreras has embodied the team’s defense-first mentality — adopted last year and actualized this season — that flipped the fortunes of a franchise fallen on hard times after decades of unrelenting excellence. St. Louis is 27-23, currently in second place in the National League Central and firmly in the postseason hunt during what was supposed to be a transitional year, thanks to perhaps the best defense in baseball. And Contreras’ positioning, as much as any moment over the first quarter of the season, illustrated who the Cardinals have become.
“I don’t care. I’m not afraid,” Contreras said. “If I’m gonna die, I’ll die right there.”
With Contreras perilously close — the only first baseman in the player-tracking era to stand closer to home on a bunt attempt, according to Statcast, was Contreras’ old Chicago Cubs teammate Anthony Rizzo — India backed away from bunting and took a strike from reliever Kyle Leahy. Contreras didn’t budge. India stared at another pitch to even the count. On the fifth pitch, India hit a one-hopper to second baseman Brendan Donovan, who flipped to shortstop Masyn Winn for the force. Winn then wheeled around, ran toward third and fired to third baseman Nolan Arenado to cut down Drew Waters, turning a perilous situation into two outs.
None of it happens, Cardinals players and coaches said, without Contreras’ daring. “He’s a savage,” left fielder Lars Nootbaar said, and that can be repeated for every Cardinal around the diamond this season, from an infield of Arenado, Winn, Donovan and Contreras to Nootbaar, Victor Scott and Jordan Walker in the outfield to Pedro Pages behind the plate. All have been average or better. Arenado, Winn, Contreras and Scott are among the best in baseball at their positions, according to publicly available metrics as well as the models of three other teams surveyed by ESPN that validated the numbers. And as was the case in the May 17 game that ended with a 1-0 win in Kansas City and plenty more, the Cardinals’ gloves have carried them into contention.
“Guys wanted to take a ton of pride in their defense,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “When we look at what we can control this year, we knew we were going to have our ups and downs, but we can control the effort and being locked in every pitch. And that’s one thing I can say with confidence: We don’t give up a whole lot. Guys are making plays left and right. They’re on point. They’re locked in every pitch.”
COMING INTO SPRING TRAINING, the Cardinals looked scarcely different than the 83-79 team that was outscored by 47 runs a season ago. They signed one free agent: reliever Phil Maton, on a one-year, $2 million contract, in mid-March. They didn’t make any trades. Cardinals fans, among the game’s most die-hard, responded accordingly: attendance at Busch Stadium cratered by more than 7,000 a game to 28,464, the lowest average, outside of the 2021 season played under some pandemic restrictions, since after the strike in 1995.
Fans could not have known what they would be missing. Not even Cardinals players themselves could have foreseen this group into a constant highlight reel of glovework.
“Early on, we didn’t talk about defense,” Arenado said. “It was: ‘We’ve got to score runs. We don’t score runs.’ So that’s all we were talking about. But then as spring went on, we’re like, all right, our defense is actually kind of good. And then as the season has gone on, it’s been like, damn, dude, we’re really good defensively.”
How the Cardinals became arguably the sport’s best defensive team is a story of process and buy-in. For decades, the Cardinal Way — the team’s ethos, codified in an 86-page handbook — was their bible. In a game dominated by objective data, St. Louis’ philosophy grew stale — and the franchise with it. President of baseball operations John Mozeliak is in his last year on the job, with former Boston chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom taking over at season’s end. Clean defense, long a hallmark, bottomed out in 2023, when the Cardinals ranked among the worst in baseball. Their pre-pitch positioning, in particular, lagged severely behind more analytically inclined organizations.
“We kind of as a team knew we weren’t in the right positions in ’23, but you have to go based off of whatever [the positioning suggestions given to players] says,” Nootbaar said. “So we did that last year, and it didn’t feel as bad, but you really felt a stark difference from being where it felt like you were never in opportunistic positions. Now it feels like we’re starting to get there.”
Positioning is just the beginning. With former big leaguers Stubby Clapp coaching the infield and Jon Jay the outfield, players were given specific areas to improve. For Scott, who was taking over in center field from a top-flight defender in Mike Siani, he needed a better first step and direction to complement his high-end speed. Nootbaar planned to work on his jumps. Walker, who was among the game’s worst defenders the past two seasons after moving from third base to right, needed to get better in all facets.
During spring training, Jay set three cones in a triangle, cued players to break toward one and tossed a racquetball at them. The outfielders would then break toward another cone and catch another ball, which required soft hands because of the racquetball’s bounciness. He encouraged outfielders to station themselves low, with knees bent, which ensured their engagement in every pitch, a Marmol must.
“It’s so hard to lock in every single pitch, and you don’t know which one’s going to be the one that is coming your way,” Marmol said. “So your ability to be mentally tough enough to do that usually leads to attention to detail in other areas.”
The new approach has paid off. Scott is near the top of leaderboards in publicly available defensive metrics. Nootbaar, Cardinals players and staff said, is playing the best defense of his career, with his first step a tenth of a second faster than last year, something he attributes to focusing on shagging balls during batting practice. Walker has acquitted himself well enough to earn praise from scouts, who had him pegged as a lost cause in right.
And the improvements go beyond St. Louis’ outfielders. Contreras has similarly surprised evaluators, who were unsure how he would fare at first after starting just four games there in his previous nine major league seasons, the majority of which he spent at catcher. With catching duties going to Pagés and 24-year-old Ivan Herrera, whose bat has been a revelation, Contreras’ shift to first to replace four-time Gold Glove winner Paul Goldschmidt was a risk the Cardinals needed to take. And it has rewarded them handsomely.
“He might be one of the best first basemen I’ve ever seen,” Mikolas said. “I knew he’d be bodying it up, and I knew he’d be picking it, but his range and his arm — he’s doing something special there at first base. I think he’s surprising a lot of people. Probably not himself. He knows how good he is.”
It has been matched throughout the infield. Donovan, a 28-year-old utilityman, has settled into second and leads the NL in hits. Winn, whose weakness going to his backhand side was mitigated by an arm that rates among the best in the game, improved his first step and is getting to more balls than ever. At 34, Arenado — a 10-time Gold Glove winner who is regarded as perhaps the best defensive third baseman ever — is moving better than in recent seasons and looking ageless in the field.
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” Arenado said, “but I don’t see a defense that’s better than us — so far that we played against — in the big leagues.”
IN BASEBALL, DEFENSE does not win championships. Sometimes it doesn’t even get a team to the postseason. None of the No. 1 defensive teams this decade has made a World Series, let alone won one. But most of the top units are at the very least successful, and if that trend continues, the Cardinals will face one of the most interesting Julys in the sport.
Coming into the season, the expectation was that St. Louis would be among the most active teams in moving players at the trade deadline. Closer Ryan Helsley is the sort of arm every contender covets. Multiple teams seen as smart with handling pitchers planned to target left-hander Steven Matz, who has excelled out of the bullpen. Right-hander Sonny Gray remains a high-strikeout, low-walk, playoff-caliber arm. Fellow right-handed starter Erick Fedde is solid, even with his lack of strikeouts, and has allowed only three home runs in 52⅓ innings. Maton has a 133 ERA+ this season and has pitched in four of the past five postseasons.
If the Cardinals spend the next two months playing like they have the first seven weeks, the prospect of them shipping off their best arms diminishes greatly. Because if anyone knows how a team can back into October and find magic, it’s the Cardinals, who turned an 83-78 regular season in 2006 into their 10th championship and a 90-win wild-card campaign into their 11th title five years later.
“I mean, a lot of us are still kind of growing,” Donovan said. “We’ve had the luxury of seeing people do it for a long time with the Cardinals and around the league, so I think it’s guys just kind of learning how to come into their own.”
Marmol has relished the growth. Now in his fourth season as manager, he has amalgamated players around a new identity of focus and structure — tenets that evoke the Cardinal Way, only modernized. Before the Contreras daredevil game, he invited a number of players into his office to give them concrete data on just how much they had improved defensively, the sort of feedback modern players particularly appreciate because of the objective nature. Gone are the bad vibes from a 12-17 start, replaced by a team that found its footing in series wins against the New York Mets, Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia and Kansas City before losing a series of close games against the team with the best record in MLB, Detroit.
“The buy-in has been through the roof,” Marmol said. “And then when they can see the improvement in numbers, however many days in, it just reinforces: don’t let up.”
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