The wait is over. The University of Texas brain trust has spent the last few months in a secret underground bunker, furiously debating who will be the next head coach of their esteemed college program. And now, as you can see by the white smoke hovering above the campus, the Longhorn Conclave has finally given us their answer: defensive coordinator Will Muschamp will succeed Mack Brown. That is, whenever Brown decides to retire. Wait, what?

(Aww … they’re already starting to act alike.)

According to CHRON.COM, Muschamp has been named “head football coach-in-waiting”, which is not a title you see every day. Essentially, Muschamp is taking some extra dough - reportedly $900,000 worth - to kind of just hang around and at least pretend to be happy with his coordinator position until Brown finally decides to hang up his spurs.

It’s kind of a stroke of brilliance by Texas.

In one fell swoop Texas gets:

(a) A contingent plan for when Brown does finally decide to leave (he’s 57 years old);
(b) To make sure that a young, up-and-coming coach doesn’t leave the school for greener pastures;
(c) To promise their recruits that, even if Brown does end up retiring one of these years, we have a back-up ready.

It’s that last one that’s particularly awesome, and will probably be an angle Texas tries to exploit in their recruiting visits. When faced between two choices, wouldn’t you want to take the school where you know for a fact who’s going to be coaching, even if the head guy steps down?

Now they just got to work on giving Muschamp a tougher look: