What’s the going price for success?
Eastern New Mexico University is about to find out.
News that the school was finalizing a deal to bring in Art Briles as its next football coach leaked into the ether Sunday night. By Monday morning, the school was preparing a press conference to roll him out. By the lunch hour, ENMU was trending as one of the top stories in college football, making headlines on major media outlets like ESPN and Sports Illustrated.
We’ll give you a minute to come up with the last time Eastern New Mexico was a national talking point for anything related to its football team. Go ahead, check. If the answer isn’t “never,” it’s pretty darn close.
Bottom line: It’s a calculated risk. It’s betting ENMU’s reputation on a happenstance roll of the dice.
Not many people outside of a very small radius have had much reason to care who coaches the Greyhounds. The fact their pick happens to be one of the more controversial figures college football has seen in recent memory makes it a splash hire worthy of the attention it’s been getting.
Now Briles joins a long list of people getting second chances. Let us count the ways: George O’Leary, Rick Pitino, Bob Huggins, Bobby Petrino, Will Wade. Hell, even Greg Heiar got another shot after his memorable implosion as New Mexico State’s basketball coach a few years ago.
Until Sunday night, some people had probably forgotten Briles even existed. Until the moment he walked onto the screen of a YouTube stream looking a little older, a lot grayer and sporting a goatee with long hair flowing out the back of his baseball cap, many had likely forgotten what he looked like.
Out of the college game for a decade following his messy and salacious end at Baylor, he was considered downright radioactive after a 2016 school-led investigation highlighted his role in a widespread sexual abuse scandal in his program. The findings implied he valued winning over doing the right thing — like holding players accountable and taking steps to investigate reported allegations.
Briles coached the Bears through the 2015 season and was fired the following year. A number of assistants and Baylor boosters remained loyal, with some publicly calling for his return.
In the court of public opinion, however, he was a pariah. He was reportedly picked for jobs in the Canadian Football League and Grambling State, but was unable to take the positions following strong backlash from his ties to Baylor.
A West Texas native, Briles was apparently never far off ENMU’s radar. After the school fired Kelley Lee last week, athletic director Kevin Fite didn’t look too far to find his guy. The pair worked together at the University of Houston, and Fite spoke glowingly about Briles during Monday’s presser.
And, really, that’s what introductory press conferences are all about. They are the proverbial meatball down the middle so you can launch it into the seats.
Briles won the presser. He got the laughs and hoo-yahs — or Roos, as ENMU calls them. He even danced his way around his misunderstanding of the basics, like not knowing the terms of his contract, the membership of the Lone Star Conference (not “league” as he called it), or his knowledge of the NCAA Division II recruiting rules.
His folksy, West Texas persona won over a crowd eager to see Greyhounds football become relevant once again.
It all brings us full circle. If the reports of a $1 million buyout are true, it’s a great incentive for Briles to succeed, land a bigger job somewhere else, and have that new school play seven figures to bring him on. If he wins and ENMU becomes a player, it will be with a new band of players plucked from the recruiting flotsam of college football.
Is any of that possible without the risk?
What’s more, is the backlash for having a man with a messy past worth the hit the school’s reputation will take if it all blows up?
Second chances are possible. Pitino has made a career of it. So has Petrino and a laundry list of others.
Now you can add Briles to that group.
Then again, maybe this will go exactly as badly as some think it will. Either way, ENMU will be stuck holding the bill. Only then will we know if it was worth it.
