TCU Football: Sonny Dykes on Kendal Briles

TCU head coach discusses the due diligence that went into hiring the new offensive coordinator

Jerome Miron/USA Today Sports

When Kendal Briles was announced as TCU’s next offensive coordinator in January, it was met with apprehension from the fanbase.

Briles’ name had been previously linked with a scandal at Baylor University that occurred from 2012 through 2016. His link to the scandal was through his father, Art Briles, the then-head coach of the Bears.

Knowing what happened at Baylor, it was to the surprise of many Horned Frog fans that Briles was selected to lead the offense as its coordinator in 2023.

When asked about the hiring process of identifying Briles, Sonny Dykes did not shy away from the happenings in Baylor. “You go back, and you look at kind of what happened at Baylor. I had worked with Art [Briles] prior at Texas Tech,” Dykes said.

As a young head coach at the time, Dykes had followed the situation, staying up-to-date with all its happening. Dykes expanded on the process of hiring him and said, “The thing that I always try to do is learn from situations. So when all that happened at Baylor, the thing I tried to do was, okay, let’s make sure this never happens in my program, and how can I go about doing that, how can I learn from mistakes that we made.”

Dykes further mentioned how he held conversations with those that were directly involved with the situation to further learn about and from it.

While Briles was linked to the Baylor scandal, Dykes explained his faith in Briles as the right coach for the job–“I knew it was going to be an unpopular hire in some ways because of what happened, but at the same time, I was very confident from knowing Kendal from the time he was 13 years old.”

Despite the happenings at Baylor that linked itself to Briles, TCU Football has a tremendous offensive mastermind now on its coaching staff, who will look to stamp his authority at the Carter in 2023.

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