Texas Football: 5 best candidates to be next defensive coordinator

4. John Chavis

Current Position: Arkansas defensive coordinator

Another safe hire that the Texas football program could make to replace Orlando as the defensive coordinator is one that has been around all over the SEC. Tenured college football defensive coach John Chavis currently resides with the Arkansas Razorbacks.

But it might not be all that difficult to draw Chavis away from Arkansas since his head coach, Chad Morris, was just let go in Fayetteville. Arkansas also isn’t the best program in the SEC at the moment. They are paying Chavis handsomely (around $1.55 million per year), but that is also a figure that could be matched by Texas.

The numbers that Arkansas posted on defense in the last two season’s shouldn’t have too much stock weighed in by the Longhorns. Arkansas was so bad under Morris’ direction that it is better to look into what Chavis did in his three stops prior to the Razorbacks. He was the defensive coordinator with the Texas A&M Aggies, Tennessee Volunteers, and LSU Tigers before that.

In his last season with a rather pedestrian level of talent with the Texas A&M defense before former head coach Kevin Sumlin was fired, Chavis led a defense that ranked within the top 45 in the nation both in terms of efficiency and points allowed per game. And his final year with the LSU defense saw them rank top five in the country in points allowed per game and in the top 10 in defensive efficiency.

This would be a safe, but good hire for Herman and the Longhorns in Chavis.