Why did Sonny Dykes hire unscrupulous Kendal Briles?
The notorious son of a despised coaching legend has landed his 6th offensive coordinator job in nine years. Why did Dykes invite him into the Fort?
NFL and college football alike have been somewhat eventful of late. I’ve tracked a little bit from my current location in a North Austin hospital. If you missed the update earlier this week, I’ve been backing off from writing a little recently while helping my family and observing my dad as he’s been battling a bad infection within an ICU.
I’m not writing to get into all that, he’s currently stable and we’re hopeful he’ll eventually recover, but I did have some time and thoughts on some recent events and figured I’d take a break in the waiting room to flesh out some observations on a particular event.
That’d be TCU’s hire of Kendal Briles as their new offensive coordinator to replace Garrett Riley.
The name Briles carries a ton of baggage in the football world. Briles was in charge during a terrible scandal at Baylor where the program was found to be looking the other way as football players were repeatedly accused of sexual assault.
Personally I’m not excited about Kendal Briles as a person based on what I know of the man. However, I’ve found it’s exceedingly common to learn something about who these various famous coaches really are and to come away being less excited about them. If Kendal Briles is a “do what it takes to win, gloss over crimes and collateral damage even to a serious degree” sort of coach (almost definitely), I’m afraid that’s not as uncommon as people would like to think, even if Baylor was one of the more egregious examples of what that can look like.
The real question here isn’t about Briles though, who’s basically a known. It’s Dykes. What he truly values and what he’s aiming to accomplish with this move.