Art Briles was just one bowl win away from becoming Texas’s next head coach. The former Big 12 coach revealed that after Mack Brown stepped down in 2013, Texas offered him a six‑year deal when he was with the Baylor Bears. But Baylor’s 52‑42 loss to UCF in the 2014 Fiesta Bowl changed everything.

“I mean, I was there. If we’d won our bowl game, I would have left Baylor 100%. It was done for me because I’m a (state of) Texas guy and (my son) Kendal played there. So it made sense,” Briles told ON3’s Brett McMurphy on August 19.

Texas had the deal ready. Briles had agreed. But then the Fiesta Bowl happened, and everything changed. Instead of leaving, he chose to stay in Waco. Texas turned to Charlie Strong, then Tom Herman in 2017, but neither found sustained success.

Meanwhile, Briles walked away from a lucrative opportunity to rebuild Baylor. Former Baylor and current Liberty AD Ian McCaw said the move was surprising given Briles’ Texas roots, but loyalty won out.

Briles arrived at Baylor in 2008 to a program mired in a 12‑year drought. By 2010, he’d broken a 14‑year bowl drought. He later delivered back‑to‑back Big 12 titles and ran one of the nation’s most explosive offenses. His tenure produced the 2011 Heisman winner Robert Griffin III.

But his Baylor journey ended abruptly in 2016 amid a sexual assault scandal. Since then, Briles received offers from Grambling State and the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger‑Cats, but backlash blocked both.

“It was hard to not get mad,” said his son, South Carolina OC Kendal Briles. “It was sad. My heart broke for him. He just wanted to coach and had this cloud hanging over him.”

A Return Almost One Decade Later

After Eastern New Mexico parted ways with coach Kelley Lee following consecutive losing seasons, AD Kevin Fite, who had worked with Briles at Houston, called him for suggestions. Briles’ reply: “What about me?”

That one sentence led Fite to make a controversial hire. Briles is now head coach at Eastern New Mexico, his first college job on American soil since Baylor.

Like Houston and Baylor, he inherits a losing team. The Greyhounds went 3‑8 in back‑to‑back seasons.

“That doesn’t scare me. We’re not gonna be a ‘deuce’; we’re up there in the ‘face cards.’ The one thing that’ll help us early is nobody will know what we’re going to do. Good luck getting some Italian film,” Briles said.

Before Eastern New Mexico, he coached at Mount Vernon High School and had two stints in Italy’s Guelfi Firenze program. Now, nearly a decade later, Briles will be determined to make his mark in U.S. College Football once again.