The Longhorns may have dodged the biggest bullet ever by never hiring Art Briles

After 15 years as the head coach of the Texas Longhorns, Mack Brown's tenure on the 40 Acres came to an end.

The looming question, then, was who would replace the National Championship-winning head coach?

Defensive coordinator Will Muschamp, who had been the heir apparent, had already left for another opportunity by 2014, and there truly weren't a lot of clear options presenting themselves to the Horns.

Eventually, Charlie Strong was named to the role, and that led to a pretty disappointing three-season stretch before he was replaced by Tom Herman, which led to a mediocre four-season stretch. The Texas football program didn't find a true replacement for Brown until it hired Steve Sarkisian in 2021.

However, no matter how disappointing Strong and Herman were, the Longhorns should breathe a deep... deep... sigh of relief that they didn't hire one man who recently shared he had been on the brink of taking over in Austin: Art Briles.

Even Charlie Strong and Tom Herman were better options that Art Briles

In 2013, Briles was the head coach of the Baylor Bears and had just led the team to its first of two consecutive Big 12 Championships. He was fresh off back-to-back bowl game victories and seemed to be one of the next star head coaches in the making.

He recently told On3's Brett McMurphy that toward the end of that 2013 season, he was in talks with the Longhorns to take over after Mack Brown parted ways with the program.

"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 Texas guy and [my son] Kendal played there. So it made sense," Briles told McMurphy.

However, Briles said that when he and the Bears lost to the UCF Knights in the Fiesta Bowl, he decided his job wasn't quite done at Baylor.

Then, just two years later, his career was derailed by a sexual assault scandal. Since then, Briles has been virtually shadow-banned from DI college football. Instead of taking over at the University of Texas, he took his coaching talents to the Canadian Football League, the Italian Football League, and a US high school.

He continued to succeed as a head coach, even securing two Italian Bowl Championships along the way, but the blemish on his resume has continued to be inescapable.

Now, Briles is returning to the collegiate football scene for the first time in over a decade, hired by the Eastern New Mexico Greyhounds ahead of the 2026 season.

Had Briles come to Texas in 2014, and the scandal had still come out at Baylor in the spring of 2016, the Horns would suddenly have found themselves in the middle of an outrage that truly had nothing to do with them in the first place.

While Briles' account of the hiring process at Texas doesn't necessarily line up with reports that come out of the 40 Acres at the time, or continue to this day, the Longhorns dodge a massive bullet by not hiring him as their next head coach, no matter how it unfolded.

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