For the first time in a decade, Art Briles is back in college football.
Briles has been hired as the head coach at Eastern New Mexico, sources confirmed to FootballScoop on Sunday night. The 69-year-old has been viewed as untouchable in college football following his firing at Baylor in 2016, but ENMU is now bringing him back in the fold. ENMU athletics director Kevin Fite previously worked with Briles at Houston.
Eastern New Mexico is a Division II school located in Portales, N.M. that competes in the Lone Star Conference. The Greyhounds went 3-8 in 2025, concluding their season on Nov. 15 with a 45-28 loss to Texas A&M-Kingsville. The program dismissed Kelley Lee as head coach on Monday after three seasons atop the program. Lee went 11-24 leading the Greyhounds, and overall the program has not enjoyed a winning season since returning from the pandemic in 2021.
Briles brings to New Mexico a 99-65 career record at the college level and a 166-46-4 mark at the high school level. He rose to prominence at Stephenville High School in the 1990s, taking a program that hadn’t made the playoffs since 1952 to four state championships in the decade. That success landed him the running backs job at Texas Tech, and then the head coaching jobs at Houston and Baylor, where he won three conference championships and Coach of the Year honors in Conference USA, the Big 12, and from the Associated Press.
He then was let go in a well-publicized and highly controversial exit after an independent investigation “reflect(ed) significant concerns about the tone and culture within Baylor’s football program as it relates to accountability for all forms of athlete misconduct.” The scandal also resulted in the removals of Baylor president Ken Starr and AD Ian McCaw.
Briles was hired, and then quickly let go from, offensive coordinator jobs with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Southern Miss in the years that followed. He spent 2019-20 as the head coach at Mount Vernon High School in Texas, where he went 20-6 in two seasons with a trip to the state semifinals. Most recently, he’s worked as the head coach of a professional football team in Italy.
Nearly a decade out of the spotlight has allowed time for rehabilitation to the Briles name. Earlier this year, Stephenville moved into its brand-new stadium bearing his name, and next fall, Eastern New Mexico will have the man himself leading the football program.
