In an interview with On3 that published Wednesday, Art Briles claims he was offered and accepted the Texas job late in 2013 before changing his mind after Baylor lost the Fiesta Bowl to UCF.
“I mean I was there,” Briles said. “If we’d won our bowl game, I would have left Baylor 100%. It was done for me because I’m a (state of) Texas guy and (my son) Kendal played there. So it made sense.” Elsewhere in the interview, Briles claimed Texas officials wanted to fly to suburban Phoenix to put pen to paper, before or after the game. Briles rebuffed that request, then had a change of heart upon returning to Waco. “I said ‘I ain’t doing it,’” Briles recalled. “They said, ‘We’ll drive down to see you,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m going to stay.’”
The end of the Mack Brown era in Austin played out throughout the 2013 season. After nearly acquiring Nick Saban from Alabama before those plans were dashed at the 11th hour in 2012, Brown's tenure at Texas seemed done for good when the Longhorns endured back-to-back blowout losses to BYU and Ole Miss in September. However, Texas opened Big 12 play with six straight wins, and at the time it seemed Brown could secure an improbable 17th season if Texas, ranked 25th but 7-1 in conference play, pulled an upset of Briles's ninth-ranked Baylor squad in the de facto Big 12 championship game -- which also happened to be the final game at Floyd Casey Stadium. The 'Horns and Bears were tied 3-3 at the half, but Baylor pulled away to win its first Big 12 title, 30-10, sending the Bears to the Fiesta Bowl and Brown into semi-retirement. Brown resigned from Texas on Dec. 14, a week after the regular season finale.
There was definitely mutual interest between Texas and Briles, but the story out of Austin was that Briles did not want to sit for an interview, believing his resume at Baylor was enough to get him the job. Texas wanted Briles to accept the job before officially offering it, leaving the school plausible deniability of having its job turned down by the Baylor coach.
Regardless of whose version of events is the closest to the actual truth, the timeline matches Briles's story of events. The Baylor-UCF Fiesta Bowl was on Jan. 1, 2014; Texas announced Charlie Strong as its next head coach on Jan. 5.
The remainder of the 2010s was not kind to either side. Briles coached two more seasons at Baylor before his ouster as part of a campus-wide scandal, and is set to begin his first college job since Baylor at Division II Eastern New Mexico later this month, while Texas would need two more head coaching hires before winning its next Big 12 championship.