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Rudey...
"Why do you think they remained strong?"
Well, it's a good question. Let me think out loud. What are the fundamentals of a consistently superior fraternity chapter? First, they establish and maintain their "personality" within a fairly rigid template. For instance, the fraternity that is always the largest, always has the most varsity athletes and always has the most student leaders - always - is going to be viewed as consistently superior.
Second, in my experience the consistently superior chapter benefits from strong and sustaining alumni support. Not the recent grads, but the guys over forty who raise money, organize events and work directly with chapter officers. You can tell right away who these chapters are when you enter a campus. For example, look at Kappa Sigma at LSU: off campus for years, and then almost instantaneously back among the leaders as soon as they recolonized.
KOT at Baylor is the beneficiary of circumstances. It's a very conservative school with lots of traditional "Greek types". KOT was the leader on campus when all the fraternities were locals. As the locals affiliated with nationals, KOT remained independent and aloof. Most important, they maintained their identity, their template of success. And, I must assume that they can count on strong and sustaining alumni support.
I still think it was difficult-to-near-impossible to do what they have done. I suspect - and this is just a guess because I've seen it before elsewhere and this would explain a lot - is that for 25 years or more they've had one alumnus who has been the leader in focusing the chapter's attention on an unclouded horizon. I can think of national chapters that have dominated a reputation for 25 years - Beta at Missouri, SAE or DKE at Alabama, ATO at Florida, Delts at Kentucky, and Kappa Sig at Arkansas are some examples - but I've never seen a local do it, or even come close. Maybe I did them a favor by failing to convince them to go national back in that long ago fall of 1977.
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