The Baylor men’s basketball program hasn’t exactly enjoyed a storied history. While the program has made it to three Final Fours, two of them came before the invention of the Barbie doll. The third, though, led to a 2021 national championship, and it was the product of an almost two-decade run of success for the program under head coach Scott Drew. 

Drew came to Baylor in 2003, after a shocking murder scandal caused its previous coach to resign. He weathered NCAA sanctions in his first years, then led the Bears to respectability by 2010, with the team making twelve NCAA tournament appearances in seventeen seasons—six of which saw the team advance to the Sweet Sixteen or better, including that 2021 title. In the past four seasons, Baylor has never entered the Big Dance seeded lower than three. 

It’s no wonder, then, that Drew’s name has been linked to the vacant coaching job at the basketball powerhouse that is the University of Kentucky. When the school’s Hall of Fame head coach, John Calipari, announced that he was leaving the school on Tuesday—and subsequently joined Arkansas as its head coach the following day—Drew was promptly named as a candidate to replace Calipari. As rumors spread across social media, Kentucky fans found themselves in a pitched battle with Chip Gaines, the Fixer Upper star and costeward, along with his wife, Joanna, of the Magnolia lifestyle brand empire. 

When news broke that Kentucky was pursuing Drew, the Barstool Sports UK X account posted a joke that suggested only Gaines, a noted Baylor alumnus and perhaps the Bears’ biggest celebrity backer, could prevent Big Blue Nation from poaching Baylor’s coach. 

That’s a pretty standard line from the Barstool bros, but Gaines himself quickly got involved. When a fan responded “Who tf is @chipgaines,” Gaines seemed to take it personally. “Ask [your mom] who I am, she’ll know,” he posted.  

And so it went, as Gaines tweeted through it, at times invoking the Higher Power in his pro-Baylor fervor. A sampling of what he spent his Wednesday afternoon posting in response to those darned Wildcats fans: “Money is boring.. everybody’s got money. We’ve got God on our side..” “The entire population of Kentucky is just a mid sized Texas town.” When another fan posted asking who he was, he responded, “This is @X bro.. @Google is what you’re needing.” And so on, and so on. 

When fans took umbrage at Gaines’s statement that “money is boring”—a reasonable take in the context of college basketball coaches (Drew makes a reported $5.1 million per year at Baylor)—the star became more magnanimous. “Chip, pass me some of that boring money. I’ll take the boredom off your hands,” wrote one fan in response to Gaines’s post, to which Gaines replied, “You got it! 100 bucks coming your way,” with an instruction to follow his assistant’s account to receive the payment. This went on for a while, too. He even promised to send a gift basket of Magnolia merch to the mom of the guy he’d initially insulted. Chip Gaines, it seems, does not like it when others are mad at him. 

By Thursday, both the fervor and the rumors had subsided. ESPN reported that morning that Drew—who had traveled with his family to Lexington on a UK booster’s private jet on Wednesday—had declined the Wildcats’ advances and would remain in Waco. Drew released a statement explaining that “we truly believe God has called my family and I to continue our work here at Baylor” and thanking Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades for his support. (The Mexican restaurant in town where Drew posted a photo of himself at lunch before flying to Kentucky received some bonus love from the Baylor faithful on Google reviews as a result.) And lo, on the third day, God, Chip, and salsa saved Baylor basketball.