Believe it or not, the men’s choir at Baylor University is more popular on social media than both the college football and college basketball teams. It even has more followers than the athletic department!
That is a pretty astonishing feat given that the Bears won a national title in one of the two most important sports as recently as five years ago.
Although it would be silly to compare the popularity of a choir to a college football team based only on Instagram, it is a testament to the musical excellence in Waco. At no other D-I university is this true!
Baylor is at a crossroads in college football and basketball.
When most people think of Waco, Texas, they either think of a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians (not the cult that drank the Kool Aid!), Chip and Johanna Gaines or Baylor University. Nowadays it is mostly the latter.
Baylor, a private Baptist research university, was founded in 1845. It the oldest continuously operating institute of higher learning in the state of Texas with a total enrollment of approximately 21,000 students.
The Bears participate in 19 intercollegiate sports as a member of the Big 12 Conference. They claim six official NCAA Division I national championships in men’s and women’s basketball, men’s tennis and equestrian.
We are only focused on the two biggest sports: football and men’s basketball.
Scott Drew, a three-time Big 12 Coach of the Year, made the NCAA Tournament in seven of the last 10 years. He won a national title in 2021. However, he has not made it out of the Second Round in his last four appearances and missed out on the Big Dance all together in 2025-26.
Drew is not going to be fired but it has yet to be seen whether his alumni base is willing to provide him with the necessary financial resources to compete in the modern NIL era. We’ll see.
The football team has been even less impressive.
Although Dave Aranda won a Sugar Bowl against an Ole Miss team that played without its star quarterback in 2021, he has recorded only one winning season in the last four years at 8-5. Everybody thought he was going to get fired at the end of the last two seasons — especially after the fans stopped showing up to games in protest — but he somehow managed to escape the chopping block.
Both programs need to show signs of life in 2026!
Men’s choir remains on the rise.
As the fanbase in Waco begins to lose interest in the mediocre product on the gridiron and hardwood, there is one group at Baylor that continues to grow in popularity. And it has nothing to do with sports.
The men’s choir recently surpassed every athletic program in terms of following on Instagram. The only account with more followers is the university itself.
Baylor men’s basketball, which won a national title, has less than 100,000 followers.
The football team has 146,000 followers.
Even the athletics department has only 116,000 followers.
Baylor University Men’s Choir has 151,000 followers…
The well-documented journey from 1,500 followers to more than 10 times that amount took only three yeas. The growth of the men’s choir account is rooted in viral moments.
Their most-viewed video was posted on March 28. 2025. It hit 2.2 million views in less than 24 hours and even got a shoutout from LeBron James!
The following post from Valentine’s Day this year helped to put the account over the edge.
It is now more popular than each and every one of the 19 athletic programs at the university.
To measure a specific program based only on its Instagram followers is not a fair barometer for popularity but this is the only school in the country where that is true. Baylor is choir school!