By Jackson Posey | Sports Editor
When news broke Sunday night that Art Briles would become the next head football coach at Eastern New Mexico, the world held its breath.
Some exhaled strings of expletives on social media. Some reveled. Others simply waited to see if the news would stick.
Briles built Baylor football from Big 12 also-ran to champion, winning back-to-back conference titles in 2013 and 2014 and coaching the school’s first Heisman Trophy winner, Robert Griffin III, in 2011. But his name and brand have been magnets for controversy since Baylor fired him amid a university-wide sexual assault scandal that involved the football program in May 2016.
The journey since has been Odyssean. In the past nine years, Briles has coached two stints in Italy (going 17-5), two years at Mount Vernon High School (going 20-6) and accepted jobs in the Canadian Football League and International Football Alliance, both of which fell apart for separate reasons.
On at least two occasions, he pursued other college coaching jobs. Southern Miss head coach Jay Hopson openly lobbied to hire Briles as an assistant coach in 2019, but the university released a statement confirming that “he is not a candidate.” Grambling State hired him in 2022, after the NCAA confirmed he’d committed no rules violations, but he resigned four days later amid public backlash.
“I feel that my continued presence will be a distraction to you and your team, which is the last thing I want,” Briles said in a statement at the time. “I have the utmost respect [for] the university, and your players.”
Now, after a string of almosts, Briles appears to be back in the game. He and ENMU director of athletics Kevin Fite worked together at Houston, where Fite served as associate athletic director for compliance and eligibility.
“I am excited to welcome Art [Briles] to Eastern New Mexico University,” Fite said in a statement. “He is an excellent coach, and I look forward to the future of Greyhound football.”
The Lariat interviewed Briles earlier this month, before the Greyhounds fired then-head coach Kelley Lee on Nov. 18. At the time, he recalled “great experiences over in Italy” and expressed gratitude for the coaching gigs he’d been hired for.
“If you throw your fishing line in the water and that fish jumps off, you don’t worry about it, you know?” Briles said. “The one you reel in, that’s the one you get. So I’ve had some jobs that have been very satisfying over the last few years.”
After Baylor, Briles’ first season coaching was in the Italian Football League. He had a 16 year old and a 40 year old on the same roster. It was “awesome.”
“The great thing about it is that it’s just pure football,” Briles said. “Those guys that live in Italy, that grew up in Italy, that are Italians, they just play for the love of the game. I mean, you can pay them a little bit, but it’s not enough for them to make an honest day’s living on — I mean, they’ve got to subsidize it with working also. But the Americans, you can pay, and they get good money and can survive.”
He went into the experience “really blind.”
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Briles said. “The thing I loved about it … football’s football. It’s an international language. That’s the easy part. The way I could talk to an American in football is the same way I can talk to an Italian, because the terminology is the same.”
Briles began his career as a high school coach, most notably at Stephenville, where he developed his spread offense and won four state championships in the 1990s. The school opened its first-ever football venue, Art Briles Stadium, earlier this fall.
His return to high school coaching was perhaps a natural progression, though not without controversy. National college football writer Pete Thamel, who last week broke the news that Baylor and athletic director Mack Rhoades were parting ways, described Mount Vernon as “the moral basement for high schools around the country.” The headline accused the school of selling its soul.
Many locals were in disbelief. One longtime city councilor told the Dallas Morning News in 2019 that “You could’ve said a unicorn is taking over, and it would’ve been as shocking.”
But it was true. Two decades after his final season at Stephenville, Briles was back at the high school level. He led the Tigers to a 20-6 record in his two seasons at the helm.
“There’d been a 20-year span in there, and you go back and you work out, you get around high school kids, and nothing has changed,” Briles said. “That part of it was extremely refreshing. And it was kind of eye-opening to me, just how good kids are. With everything going on in the world, they still have the same ambitions and desires that kids had back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
The Mount Vernon position opened in May 2019 after the school’s head coach, Josh Finney, accepted the top job at nearby Winnsboro, Mount Vernon’s biggest rival. A must-win game suddenly became that much bigger.
“I’d kinda forgotten the intense desire of one community to win at a football game over the other,” Briles said. “The first time we played them, you couldn’t find a parking place. You couldn’t find a seat. You couldn’t find anywhere to stand. I mean, it was packed solid.”
Instead of spending pregame at Mount Vernon’s Don Meredith Stadium, Winnsboro warmed up at its home field before the game, then drove 20 minutes north to sneak in before kickoff.
Mount Vernon won, 47-28.
“The game started at 7:30 … and they show up on their buses at like 7:15,” Briles said. “They didn’t even warm up there. They just come over there and get off the bus and walk on the field and play, because — just to add flavor to it. So that was just fun, it was fun to get back in those really intense situations.”
The job at Eastern New Mexico marks a new chapter in Briles’ story. In October 2023, a judge dismissed Briles and former Baylor Athletic Director Ian McCaw from a lawsuit, ruling that “no reasonable jury” could’ve found them guilty of negligence. Briles, who described himself as being “probably … as-investigated as any coach around,” said he felt “relieved” by the decision. He declined to comment any further on matters relating to the circumstances surrounding his exit at Baylor.
Months after his firing, in September 2016, Briles told ESPN that he had some reflection to do.
“There were some bad things that happened under my watch,” Briles said. “And for that, I’m sorry. … I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m going to learn. I’m going to get better.”
Briles’ introductory press conference at ENMU is scheduled for 3 p.m. Monday. The event will be streamed here.
