Will Muschamp returns to Texas older and wiser

When the call came from Steve Sarkisian last December, the Muschamp family was ready to roll back to Austin. “I’ll go tomorrow,” Carol Muschamp told her husband. “There’s only one Texas,” Jackson Muschamp told his father.

“You’ve got to do this. ” So Will Muschamp once again became the defensive coordinator for the Texas Longhorns, returning to the Forty Acres almost 15 years to the day after walking away from his title as the head coach in waiting under Mack Brown and taking on the difficult challenge of replacing Urban Meyer as the head coach for the Florida Gators. With glasses perched on the end of his nose, streaks of gray in his hair, and a few more wrinkles in his forehead, Muschamp was adamant that he’d aged better than some of the reporters in the recruiting lunge at the Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletic Center on Thursday — “Kirk Bohls, guy’s been rode hard and put up wet” — but he’s certainly not the same coach he was when he left Texas.

“What do you know now that you didn’t know when you walked out of here? ” “How much time you got? ” Muschamp responded.

The long answer would certainly take more time than the allotted 20 minutes before the breakout session with Muschamp’s defensive assistants, but the short answer was “a lot. ” “Being a coach, you live and learn and you get better as you go,” Muschamp said. Some of those lessons were hard earned with a 56-51 record over nine seasons as a head coach.