Longhorns have grown accustomed to losing
FRISCO, TEXAS — Tom Herman stood before the Texas football team for the first time last November. He told any player who had been on a winning Longhorn squad to raise their hand. Three hands went up. Herman’s message was clear. These ‘Horns don’t know how to win. They’ve gone 5-7, 5-7 and 6-7 the last three seasons.
“Players who came to Texas came here to win,” said junior offensive tackle Connor Williams. “To hold trophies. For us to not to do that, it’s an eye-opening experience. We must be doing something wrong, so we’re trying to figure it out.”
The Texas brass figured it out this way. UT fired Charlie Strong and made the no-brainer hire of Herman, who coached Houston to a Peach Bowl upset of Florida State two seasons ago and to an upset of OU last season.
Herman is a great coach. He is not a magician. Just as Bob Stoops spent a year teaching the 1999 Sooners how to win before great glory grew, Herman has to break the ‘Horns from the habit of losing.
“It’s nothing different than what we’ve done everywhere we’ve been, and that’s to compete every day in what we do and make sure there are tangible rewards for winning,” Herman said Tuesday at Big 12 Media Days.
Herman has established competition in
academics and conditioning drills and anything in which he can identify a winner. The winners eat better than the losers. He wants the ‘Horns to know there are consequences for defeat.
“I think losing has to be awful, and you can never get used to losing,” Herman said. “That is one of the biggest downfalls of a lot of teams. No, losing is awful. It’s awful. It’s not just, oh, well, we’ll get them next week. No, this is like the sky-is-fallingtype stuff.
“It’s not funny and it’s not hokey or corny ... it’s really, really bad for them to lose, as well as it being very, very cool and very rewarding for the guys that win. Because
that’s what happens on Saturdays.”
Linebacker Naashon Hughes is one of the three Longhorns left from the 2013 Texas team that went 8-5.
“At Texas, it doesn’t seem that would ever happen,” Hughes said of the Texas slump. “It would be like the world’s coming to an end, almost. We’ve had three seasons in a row that have been under the Texas standard.”
The Longhorns have slumped before. Between 1985 and 1998, UT won more than seven games only four times. When John Mackovic’s 1997 team went 4-7, he was fired and Mack Brown was hired.
In Brown’s second and third seasons, his staff included a young graduate assistant. Tom Herman.
Herman said that rebuilding was comparable to this, though Texas had won the 1996 Big 12 title. Herman noted that Brown’s first full recruiting class included the likes of Cory Redding and Chris Simms, and UT had just opened a glittering new football headquarters, Moncrief-Nuehaus, which “attracted a lot of players and again made Texas kind of the cool place to go,” Herman said. Now Texas is renovating that same facility.
So there is some karma to get excited about. But Herman issues a warning to fans.
“They love to throw
on their burnt orange sunglasses and have all these crazy expectations,” Herman said. But the 17-year-olds Texas is recruiting don’t know much about ‘Horn heights. To them, the Longhorns are middle of the road Big 12.
“The Texas they know is a lot different than the Texas that people in my generation know,” Herman said. “It’s our job to show them what Texas is capable of, what Texas has been in the past, and what we’re planning on being again in the future.”
What happened at Texas? Well, continuity has fled Austin. Since playing for the 2009 national championship, the Longhorns have had three head coaches, three athletic directors, two university presidents and a different quarterback seemingly every year. Garrett Gilbert, David Ash, Case McCoy, Jerrod Heard, Tyrone Swoopes, now Shane Buechele.
The Longhorns have leaped aboard the treadmill of trying new things, and they’ve gone from great to good to mediocre. Irrelevant is all that’s left, which indeed would be like the end of days.