Of the 41 states in the union that have a Football Bowl Subdivision team within their borders, none have more than Texas.

For 12 days, as teams nationwide dig into preseason drills, USA TODAY Sports’ college football reporters traversed the state of Texas and visiting each of its one dozen FBS programs. AT&T presents Two Weeks in Texas …

Day 12: Baylor

WACO, Texas — Last December, as Baylor celebrated another Big 12 Conference championship, members of the athletic department’s Applied and Athletic Performance staffs were at NASA headquarters in Houston, studying space travel.

They had lunch with biochemists. Met astronauts and flight surgeons. Picked the brains of psychologists tasked with crew selection. Sat down with rocket scientists — meaning, essentially, that for the first time in human history, football really was on par with rocket science.

Earlier this summer, the department played host to a company from Slovenia with a groundbreaking tool: TMG, short for tensiomyography, allows its users to track the performance of specific muscle groups — right leg and left leg, right hamstring and left, so on — and compare the results. In layman’s terms, the tool allows skilled eyes to see variance in muscle activity, which can help accurately predict the risk of injury.

The Slovenian contingent was preceded and followed, at various times, by groups from Brazil, Canada and elsewhere. Members of the applied performance staff keep tabs on what’s going on in Europe, in China, in Japan, aware of one fact: The competition for technology doesn’t stop in the United States.

“We talk about one percenters,” said Andrew Althoff, the director of Baylor’s Applied Performance department. “We want to be around the one percenter, the elite of the elite.”

At face value, the Bears tout off-field accoutrements of unimposing stature: Baylor’s weight room covers 13,500 square feet, an area dwarfed by many of its Big 12 peers, and includes the same basic equipment — benches, pulleys, presses and the like — seen in training areas on every level of football.

But Baylor, which begins the 2015 season at No. 4 in the Amway Coaches Poll, doesn’t just stand on the cutting edge of training and development; put simply, Baylor’s embrace of technology is intended to place the program on a different plane than the rest of the Football Bowl Subdivision.

“We’re not looking around at other people at our level,” Baylor coach Art Briles told USA TODAY Sports. “We’re looking better. That’s kind of always been our trademark, being trendsetters and maybe being a little different.

“That’s something we take a lot of pride in. We’re not going to look over the fence at somebody else. We want to do things on our way.”

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The applied performance team utilizes between 20 and 35 pieces of technology daily, each pegged toward maximizing the production of an player roster known for its physical marvels.

Players spit into cups, with the saliva then tested for the amount of sodium and potassium they exude in their sweat. The nutrition staff then uses this data to diagnose eating and drinking habits, even going so far as to give players bottles of salt water to drink during practice.

Another program, called Omegawave, provides heart-rate information, wellness monitoring and general athletic readiness; boiled down, the program measures a player’s central nervous system to gauge whether he is optimally prepared to maximize his athletic ability.

Players will wear two items at every practice. The first, a heart-rate monitor, straps across their chests; a second, a GPS tool, fits between their shoulder blades. The latter will give the performance staff the total distance players travel, and at what velocity and capacity.

Broken down by position, the information is then compared and contrasted against normative data, and then supplied to the coaching staff on daily spread sheets. Each set of drills will reveal 400 lines of data; if the Bears have 10 periods of practice, the day will end with a total of 4,000 lines of data for one practice per person.

“It’s a direct order from the boss,” Althoff said. “They want to be trendsetters and they want to be out in front. So if that’s what we’re going to do, that’s what we’re going to do. If we’re told to be a trendsetter, we’re going to reach and use our connections the best we can and find out what’s latest and greatest.”

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Yet above it all, beyond the numbers, data and metrics, one asset defines the Bears’ rapid rise from national afterthought to annual championship contender: Baylor doesn’t build athletes but develops them, marrying cutting-edge technology with a decidedly old-school approach to strength and conditioning.

“It all starts with athletic ability,” Briles said. “What we look for are guys that fit our style, and our style is kind of a fearless, fast, aggressive type of person. Once we can get them in here, the way that we can transform them physically, that helps blend with them mentally what we’re looking for. After a year or two of that, we can have a bona fide stud.”

It begins as freshmen, when Baylor’s newcomers are indoctrinated — harshly, and with total disregard for hurt feelings and bruised egos — into the program by strength and conditioning coach Kaz Kazadi, one of Briles’ initial hires in the winter of 2008.

“Freshmen and me don’t get along,” Kazadi said. “We don’t, and we’re not supposed to. This is business. I want to be the first person to introduce them to that. I don’t mention love. I don’t need any more friends. I don’t care if they like me or not.”

Those who wear redshirts as freshmen undergo grueling training sessions the program calls “agoge,” a Greek term used to describe the arduous training methods used by the Spartans. At 5 a.m. every Friday, these players are shepherded into a dark weight room and surrounded by mask-wearing members of the strength and conditioning staff, who exhort their charges through a series of punishing workouts.

Similar training routines, from a player’s first year through his last, provide the backbone of Baylor’s development efforts.

“He turns you into a beast,” wide receiver Corey Coleman said of Kazadi. “He makes you feel like nobody can stop you. People are not doing what we’re doing. Our mentality is different.”

The result is a team as physically impressive as any in college football. Defensive end Shawn Oakman, a potential No. 1 overall pick in next year’s NFL draft, is 6-feet-9, 275 pounds and can make a 40-inch box jump while holding a pair of 70-pound dumbbells. Defensive tackle Andrew Billings squats 690 pounds and clean-lifts 400 pounds — and, for good measure, runs a 4.94-second 40-yard dash.

Tight end LaQuan McGowan is a six-foot-seven, 410-pound “experiment,” Briles said, a player so physically imposing the coaching staff no longer lets him block teammates during practice — though they did once, on the first day of spring drills, and quickly learned their lesson.

“We expect these guys to be this way,” Briles said. “To be explosive, powerful, fast, physical, intelligent, passionate, inspirational. And when you do all those things right, that’s when you can have exceptional outcomes on the field, which is ultimately the goal that you’re searching for.”

Baylor’s roster enjoys its reputation for being well-stocked with remarkable physical specimens.

“You don’t get them too often, but when you do you’ve got to showcase those guys,” McGowan said. “You go on away games, those people have to be the first people off the bus. You’ve got to be the first people they see when we walk off the bus. You’ve got to be the first people they see on the field. You’ve got to put your freaks up front. That’s how it’s got to be.”

Simultaneously, Baylor’s traditional approach to player development — weights, conditioning, training — works hand in hand with the background information supplied by next-generation technology.

“If you don’t have great athletes and you don’t have great training in place, then no matter what you’re monitoring, you’re not monitoring good stuff,” Althoff said. “The first thing is making sure that we’ve great athletes in place.”

Three years ago, Althoff and his staff began modeling what results would be produced were Baylor to engage in an ideal practice session. The group was amazed at what they saw as they combed through Baylor’s on-field data: The model and the Bears’ actual numbers were nearly identical.

“The practices were structured ideally,” he said. “If the smartest sports scientists were going to write down and structure a practice, they would do it the way the Coach Briles does.”

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Initially, Baylor’s trendsetting approach was built out of necessity: Briles inherited one of the nation’s worst teams in 2008, after a successful run at the University of Houston, and needed to perform a bottom-up overhaul along every inch of the moribund and dilapidated program — and was unafraid to adopt any advancement, however untested, that might give the Bears an edge.

“We had to be trailblazers and trendsetters,” Briles said. “I just think it’s the makeup of our DNA. It’s a program and a system that’s always moving and has a lot of energy … you know, a fearless quality to it that’s not going to worry about the outcome as you’re going through the process.”

As time has passed, however, and as Baylor has cemented its place among the elite programs in current college football, the mindset has undergone a transformation. Essentially, the Bears’ drive no longer comes from a need to catch up; the program is instead propelled by the next unfulfilled achievement — which in this case, after back-to-back conference titles, is a national championship.

“We’ve got goals and aspirations to be Big 12 champions again, three times,” McGowan said, “and then, God willing, national champions.”

One thing hasn’t changed, however: Despite recent growth, Baylor never suffers for motivation.

“I have a big fear of failure,” Kazadi said. “The more you pat me on the back, the more squinted my eyes get, the more paranoid I get. The more you write articles about us, the more upset I get. I don’t do a good job of saying, you know what, today was a good day. If I hear the word good, I wonder why it wasn’t great.

“This is the thing I don’t want to do to Coach Briles: I don’t want to not meet what his expectations are.”

Said Briles, “That’s daily living for us. That’s what I’m proud of, that we haven’t settled down and plateaued. We’re still climbing that ladder. That’s what’s inspiring to me. We’re always looking for ways to get better.”

For this program, getting better means being different. Athletes are born, not made; at Baylor, however, technology and training has allowed inherent athleticism to be developed to the fullest level — as of today, at least. But tomorrow’s a new day, and with it might come a new way for the Bears to measure and maximize their own ability.

“There is no place for mediocrity in our business,” said Briles. “Normal cannot exist. That’s the thing that we’re always searching for.”