Dealing with the coaching rumor mill even tougher in age of social media.
Chris Petersen has been down this road enough to qualify as something of an expert. • Like clockwork, any number of high-profile college football head coaching jobs would open. And each year Petersen would say “thanks, but no thanks” and remain at Boise State, where he had an unprecedented run that put the Broncos, despite being outside the so-called Power Five, on the national stage. • He was linked to jobs from one part of the country to the other, primarily the West Coast at USC, UCLA and Stanford. • Each time he chose to stay on Boise State’s famed blue turf, eight seasons in all, until Washington finally was able to pry him away in 2013. • “Pretty much zero,” Petersen said when asked how many reports of his interest or contact elsewhere were true. “Maybe one or two, but it wasn’t much because every year there was a lot of them. Ninety-nine percent of them were not true.”
With a nonstop news cycle, team-specific blogs and ability to have a 140-character tweet spread like wildfire in a matter of seconds, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for coaches, including second-year University of Houston coach Tom Herman, to avoid the constant rumor mill.
At the same time, the lies are blurred between what’s real and what’s not for fan bases hoping to keep a coach or as quickly get rid of one and land the next hot name.
To put rumors to bed, Petersen — who going into Saturday had the Huskies 8-0 and No. 5 in the first College Football Playoff rankings — said he followed one simple rule.
“For most of my time there, it wasn’t even an issue because (my players) knew I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “I always think honesty is the best policy that pretty much solves a lot of things.”
Handling the chatter
Search any number of websites and Herman’s name regularly comes up as a top candidate for several big-time jobs, most notably LSU, and a few such as Texas and Oregon that still have coaches.
Even two losses in three weeks — which knocked the Cougars from sixth to unranked in the national poll — has done little to quell the talk Herman plans to leave Houston after only two seasons.
“That assumption is definitely way off base,” Herman said.
Herman, 41, has seen his stock soar in the past three years. He has gone from offensive coordinator and winning a national title at Ohio State to a quick turnaround at UH, which is 20-3 in his two seasons and won the American Athletic Conference and a New Year’s Six bowl in 2015.
In his first season, Herman was mentioned as a candidate for at least four jobs.
One website said Herman “had reached a deal” to become the coach at South Carolina, pending his wife, Michelle, “signing off on the city of Columbia.”
Another web report said Herman had agreed to become coach at Georgia.
After the season, Herman admitted talks with one school, presumably South Carolina, “got very intense” before he decided to stay at UH and received a reworked contract that pays $3 million annually.
The rumors eventually followed Herman into this season.
In July, Herman was linked to the Baylor job after his former boss, Mack Rhoades, was named athletic director. He interrupted a family vacation to put out a statement, saying the report was “completely ridiculous and absolutely false.”
Within hours of LSU firing Les Miles on Sept. 25, reports surfaced Herman and agent Trace Armstrong had been contacted.
Annoyed and bothered by the speculation, Herman said he has learned “it’s the nature of the beast” and “at the end of the day it’s not going to stop.” He was right. Less than a month later, a web report said Herman to Texas as the replacement for Charlie Strong was “all but official.”
Herman said he’s done addressing “bogus information.”
“I’m done being the media police,” he said.
“I’m done chasing down erroneous reports. I’m done putting out statements to refute bogus information.
“It’s not my job. My job is to concern myself with the 100 or so players on this team and get them ready for a football game.”
Herman has had “some really good honest and open conversations” with his players.
The job speculation and uncertainty whether Herman will be on the UH sideline in 2017 has fueled speculation that it caused a distraction that led to losses to Navy and SMU and tougher-than-expected victories over Tulsa and Central Florida.
Senior captain and tight end Tyler McCloskey said the rumors “have not been a distraction at all.”
“We’re a very transparent program,” senior linebacker Steven Taylor said. “Coach Herman told us straightforward that he’s not listening to anything.
“He’s all-in just like we are. He said it would be unfair for us to have to deal with that distraction. He stepped on that roach before it got in the kitchen.”
Making UH attractive
With the immediate success in Herman’s debut season, Houston officials took the unusual steps of reworking his contract last December, bumping his annual base salary from $1.35 million to $3 million that makes him the highest-paid coach in the Group of Five.
It was a clear message from Hunter Yurachek, UH’s vice president for intercollegiate athletics, that the school “doesn’t need to be a steppingstone for coaches but rather a destination.”
“Coach Herman is one of the hottest coaches in the country,” Yurachek said recently. “He is a hot commodity. We want him to be our hot commodity.”
UH administrators have had preliminary discussions on parameters of a new contract for Herman that would not only raise his base salary but also address some of the facility needs, such as an indoor practice facility that has been approved and securing funding for a football operations building.
A contract offer for Herman likely would begin at $4 million per year and would place him among the top 20 Football Bowl Subdivison coaching salaries in the nation.
It is for that reason, along with Herman’s ability to win at Houston, that some perceive UH to be a better job than some Power Five schools. Others believe the Big 12 Conference’s decision not to expand will lead to Herman leaving Cullen Boulevard.
Herman has not publicly given a commitment to stay at UH. It does not mean a decision has been made, but rather he’s waiting until the end of the season to weigh his options.
The speculation game
Fueling speculation has been the high turnover rate at FBS schools in recent years, with 15 head coaching changes last year, 20 in 2014, 31 in 2013 and 28 in 2012, according to data provided by the American Football Coaches Association.
In the last two years, 11 coaches have retired or been fired before November, including three — Miles, Ron Turner (Florida International University) and Darrell Hazell (Purdue) — this year.
“Right now with the 24-hour, seven day-aweek news cycle that we deal with, especially the advent of social media, all these things are played out earlier and more frequently than what they used to be,” said AFCA executive director Todd Berry. “I think social media has certainly changed the game.”
Berry said he was always upfront and that “99 percent of the things that you deal with (regarding speculation) are damage control” with current players, recruits and school administrators.
Team will hear it first
“I always told the players that anything that has substance, they are going to hear it from me first,” said Berry, who last coached at Louisiana-Monroe in 2015. “I told the team I would not do anything ever in season while we are playing.”
With so much information out there, Chris Vannini said there exists a fine line on what he aggregates or ultimately reports as managing editor of the website CoachingSearch.com, which tracks daily coaching news in the college and professional ranks.
“It comes down to the credibility and reputability of who is originally reporting it,” Vannini said. “I obviously try and confirm and break news on anything I hear. But when citing somebody else’s report it comes down to track record.”
Information that once “stayed in that bubble” of team message boards where fans gather has morphed into a web free-for-all where anybody can post on a blog or social media “hoping to get attention or a response.”
Speculation is just that
“There’s a lot more noise out there,” Vannini said. “Coaches end up having to deal with it. They end up having to either deny or brush it off.”
California coach Sonny Dykes, who interviewed with Missouri and was reportedly on the radar of South Carolina and Virginia last season, has learned not to pay attention to the constant speculation.
“People just throw stuff out there and you have to understand that’s part of the business, Dykes said. “What I learned is you don’t worry about that stuff.”
Pat Fitzgerald, a rarity in the coaching business with 11 seasons at his alma mater Northwestern, has been rumored in the past for jobs at Texas, USC and even the NFL, given his success at building a program in the ultracompetitive Big Ten.
“When you have success, your name is going to be mentioned for high-profile jobs,” Fitzgerald said. “You just cannot get on that roller coaster.
“Speculation is exactly that.”