Welcome to Austin, Coach Austin!

The word coming down today, with considerable confidence, is that Teryl Austin will be named the new defensive coordinator at Texas. The writing was on the wall when the job description went online yesterday, and it matched his experience perfectly.

I’m not sure what to think about this hire. He’s a bit of an unknown, as opposed to Muschamp, who was already on everyone’s radar when he moved to the Forty Acres.

Austin was promoted from defensive back position coach to defensive coordinator at Florida after the 2009 season. That’s all of one year’s experience as a coordinator.

Urban Meyer says great things about him, but given the way things went down after Meyer’s flirtation with retirement a year ago, it’s unclear whether Austin was a good hire, or just the best he could come up with at the time.

Although I didn’t see enough of Florida to say personally, from what I hear, the Florida defense this season was fairly comparable to that of Texas. They both lost a lot of talent to the NFL. They both had offenses that regularly got them in trouble with turnovers. They both had very good total defense stats, but mediocre scoring defense. And neither could make the stop when it counted.

Many people think the Florida defense had less talent than the Texas defense this year, and they certainly played in a tougher conference. Much tougher, in fact.

And people seem to think that Florida’s defense outperformed expectations, to at least a certain degree. I do like the sound of that.

I really like the idea of Randy Shannon joining the Texas program, but I’ll admit that Austin probably has more upside. We don’t really know what Austin’s potential is. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a bit scary.

In Mack we trust, I guess.