A decade after Tom Herman was the “can’t miss” coaching candidate, he’s a cautionary tale
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If you could’ve bought stock in Tom Herman a decade ago, his shares would’ve been among the most expensive in the sport. Heading into 2015, he was months removed from winning the Broyles Award as the top assistant in the sport after Ohio State won a national title with 3rd-string quarterback Cardale Jones. As he began his first head coaching job at Houston, Herman’s place atop the sport felt inevitable.
He was supposed to rise the ranks, get to a place where he could compete for national titles and become a mainstay toward the top of annual coach rankings. Two out of those 3 things happened.
A decade later, Herman will never be an FBS head coach again. I suppose I should never say “never” in a sport that just welcomed Rich Rodriguez and Scott Frost back to their old jobs, but it’s fair to say something else.
In 2025, those Herman shares now are worthless.
Why? Like, besides the fact that he got fired from FAU before he reached the end of Year 2? And is there something to be learned from his rise and fall?
Sure. For starters, trolling a college quarterback’s celebration when you’re coaching a 6-6 team in the Texas Bowl is never a good look, and neither is giving the double birds to a TV camera during Signing Day on your own network. If there was a handbook on “things that coaches in high-profile jobs should avoid,” you’d have to include those 2 Herman blunders in the chapter on “loser behavior.”
We should’ve known then that Herman was an odd duck
As this sport has shown us time and time again, as long as you’re an odd duck that wins (Les Miles), you can be embraced. When you’re the coach that can’t beat Maryland, well, you tend to not get the benefit of the doubt. Not at a place like Texas, who won that breakup 10 times over with Steve Sarkisian. The Longhorns went from declaring they were “back” after a 4-loss season with Herman to playing down-to-the-wire Playoff semifinal games with Sarkisian.
As Texas chased down an SEC Championship berth in Year 1 in its new conference, Herman chased down USF coach Alex Golesh after his FAU squad suffered a blowout loss and dropped to 2-6.
That was shades of the time when Herman got an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for going ballistic after his defense got a late hit in during a kneel-down situation at the end of Texas’s Playoff-derailing loss to Oklahoma State in 2018.
Another noteworthy Herman exit was how he left Houston for Texas at the end of the 2016 season. Ahead of the regular-season finale at Memphis, he said that he told Houston players that he wasn’t leaving for the LSU job … but upon arrival in Houston after that game, he met with Texas officials and took that job the following day (H/T Houston Chronicle).
Herman and “normal exits” didn’t really exist after he left Ohio State to begin his head coach career, though there didn’t appear to be any love lost between Urban Meyer and Herman. After Texas lost that aforementioned Maryland game in Herman’s debut, Herman infamously said that they weren’t going to be able to “sprinkle fairy dust” and magically turn the program around. Meyer said it drove him “insane” to hear first-year coaches blaming players like Herman did (H/T CBS Sports).
Even the eventual Texas exit, which didn’t come until January after the tumultuous 2020 season, was reportedly done in part because Herman didn’t force players to sing “The Eyes of Texas” alma mater after games. Believe who you will with that.
But the moral of Herman’s story isn’t necessarily about awkward departures. Great coaches have had not-so-great exits. Look at Steve Spurrier. He stunned everyone when he stepped down Florida after the 2001 season (he took the Washington Redskins job shortly thereafter), and he quit at South Carolina in the middle of the 2015 season. Even Nick Saban infamously said that he wasn’t leaving the Miami Dolphins for the Alabama job … only to take the Alabama job a few weeks later.
If you win enough, people will eventually move past messy exits. If you rub enough people the wrong way and don’t win enough, you’re persona non grata.
That’s now Herman as a college head coach. If someone at the Power Conference level thought he just got a raw deal at Texas, he would’ve been scooped up at any point in the last 4 years. Instead, Herman had a year working behind the scenes in the NFL with the Chicago Bears, an idle year away from football and most recently, a 2-year stint leading FAU to a 6-16 record that never flirted with anything close to Lane Kiffin‘s redemption story in Boca Raton. Herman could still get scooped up for an offensive analyst role by somebody for the 2025 season, but barring that, he won’t have a coaching job for the second season in the 2020s.
That’s hard to fathom for a coach who won a Broyles Award on a national championship team in 2014 and then led multiple programs to a top-10 finish in the latter half of the 2010s (2015 Houston and 2018 Texas). Usually even if those coaches get fired, they get a long runway for a redemption arc.
The aforementioned Rodriguez went down as one of the biggest coaching busts in college football history at Michigan. He’s since gotten 3 FBS head coaching jobs, 2 of which were at the Power Conference level. Bobby Petrino had arguably the most noteworthy exit by a college head coach in the 21st century, and he’s since gotten 3 head coaching jobs (2 FBS, 1 FCS), as well as 2 SEC offensive coordinator jobs.
And yet, Herman is now out of coaching at the FBS level, perhaps for good. Lord knows he doesn’t need the money after he got a $15 million buyout from Texas and a reported $4 million buyout at FAU. One can’t help but think that Herman’s story in college football has already been written.
Last week, Herman turned 50 years old. It doesn’t feel like long ago that he was a 30-something up-and-comer with seemingly everything in front of him. If Herman’s rise and fall taught us anything, it’s that there are no sure things in this sport.
Well, check that.
A coach mocking an opposing player’s touchdown celebration is always loser behavior.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
