Art Briles stood on a practice field in Portales, New Mexico, watched a kick drift wide in that nonstop southern wind, and handed his kicker the most nauseating line in college football.
“That’s why God made tomorrows,” Briles told him. “Because tomorrow you get another chance.”
I have covered this sport long enough to know when a sentence is coaching and when a sentence is a confession. That one was both. Because Art Briles finally got his tomorrow. The survivors of what happened on his watch at Baylor are still waiting on theirs.
Nearly a decade after Baylor fired him amid a sexual assault scandal that gutted a university’s reputation, Briles is a college head coach on American soil again. Not at a Power program. Not even at a mid-major with real lights. At Eastern New Mexico, Division II, roughly 6,000 students, a football operating budget of $1.4 million, and a Greyhounds team coming off back-to-back 3-8 seasons. Portales sits between Lubbock and Roswell. The athletic director himself will tell you there are more cows than people. The old stadium eight miles out has sat empty for 11 years like a warning nobody heeded.
This is not a comeback. This is what residual oxygen looks like when the big stage has already slammed every door.
Due Diligence Does Not Equal Clean Hands
Kevin Fite hired him. Fite worked with Briles at Houston. Fite spent years in compliance, including time around the enforcement apparatus that looked at Baylor. He even called Chad Jackson, Baylor’s compliance officer during the Briles years, and Jackson recommended the hire. President James Johnston said they ran “due diligence like we would any other employee.”
Any other employee.
I want that phrase carved into the press release and mailed to every parent who just sent a kid to Portales. Briles left Baylor with a $15.1 million settlement and a 99-65 record across Houston and Baylor, a Heisman winner in Robert Griffin III, and four quarterbacks who started in the NFL. The offensive mind was never the indictment. The culture around that program was. The big-time game treated him like radioactive material for ten years. Hamilton pulled an offer. Grambling lasted four days before he stepped aside. High school in Mount Vernon. The Italian league. Exile with a whistle.
And Eastern still said yes.
When Fite announced it, he called Briles “an excellent coach” and said he looked forward to the future of Greyhound football. Briles took the mic and said, “It’s a great moment for me. I hope it’s a great moment for this university.” He added he is “not exactly a young pup,” that he is going to “come hard and heavy,” that they are going to “love each other” and go get the Lone Star Conference.
Love each other. From that mouth. On that campus. After that history.
I have watched this man for years. I watched the Baylor ascent. I watched the collapse. I watched the sport pretend a decade of silence and a couple of Italian trophies somehow recalibrated the moral math. It did not. It never does.
Portales Is Exile, Not Absolution
Look at the contract Sportico obtained. Two years. $140,000 a year. Incentives that top out if he somehow wins a national title at this level. If Briles walks away early, he owes the school $2 million. If the school fires him without cause, it owes him nothing. That is not a power coach dictating terms. That is a 70-year-old man who understands exactly how few rooms will still let him in the building.
Fite has said he was hoping Briles would throw his own name into the hat. Briles told him to hang on, that this would not be as easy as it sounded. He was right. Not because of Southwest Airlines road trips or locker rooms that lose to half the high schools in Texas. Because every Saturday he stands on that sideline, Eastern New Mexico is announcing what it values more than the people damaged under the old regime.
I am not interested in the nostalgia play. I am not interested in the son-in-law ties to the program or the Houston reunion tour. I am interested in the standard. College football hands out second chances like candy for gambling, for fighting, for tanking academics, for half the sins in the manual. The Briles case was different even by this industry’s rotting measuring stick. That is why the Power conferences would not touch him. That is why it took a desperate D-II job in the New Mexico wind to finally say the words out loud.
The Scoreboard Still Outranks the Survivors
Briles will win games. The man can coach. Somebody will point at a September upset or a bowl of some Lone Star variety and call it redemption. Do not insult me with that word. Redemption requires more than a whistle and a lower division. It requires the people who got crushed to matter more than the man who wants another chapter.
Eastern New Mexico chose the chapter. They chose the 99 wins over the wreckage. They chose “excellent coach” as the whole argument. God made tomorrows, Briles told that kicker. Art Briles got his.
The people failed by Baylor football never did. And no amount of cattle stench or friendly-people billboards in Portales is going to scrub that clean. THIS HIRE IS A STATEMENT. I heard it. So should you.
