A few days before recruits in the 2021 recruiting class managed to sign the National Letters of Intent on Early Signature Day, Texas Longhorns athletics director Chris Del Conte released a statement of support for coach Tom Herman, who was so warm that needed immediate clarification.
“There has been a lot of speculation about the future of our football coach. My policy is to wait until the end of the season to rate and comment on our football and coaches program. With the end of the regular season, I want to reiterate that Herman is our coach, ”said Del Conte.
Del Conte was quickly forced to explain that he intended his statement to mean that Herman would return as the head coach in 2021. While the questions revolved about Herman’s future, Del Conte had spent the previous months in silence.
On Saturday morning, however, Del Conte and the Texas administration changed their minds, firing Herman and quickly hiring Alabama’s offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian as his replacement.
In an interview with Austin American-Statesman on Saturday night, Del Conte explained some of the ideas behind a reversal that followed one of the most impressive bowling performances in the program’s history.
One passage stood out:
Current players are leaving and recruits are looking elsewhere. Then, Del Conte learned that some players currently on the squad were doing negative recruitment, telling some not to come to UT. However, it is not uncommon for discontented and outgoing players to speak negatively about a coaching staff they dislike.
Recruitment problems were one of the factors that pushed the Herman era to the limit in the first place – after a regular 7-5 season in 2019, Herman fired his two coordinators and replaced five more assistant coaches, a complete restructuring of his team that behind the Longhorns in a position to play catch up with 2021 recruiting class.
Hindered by the pandemic, Texas was never able to catch up with its rivals, forcing Herman to sign a group of candidates that represented the lowest-ranking class for the Horns in the modern era of recruitment.
In the 2022 class, the October cancellation of Southlake quarterback Carroll Quinn Ewers, a player considered to be a potentially generational talent in his position, not only represented Ewers rescinding the vote of confidence in the Texas program he had just given a few weeks earlier, it also destroyed the potential positive side of the class with Herman.
During a bizarre speech at a news conference on Monday in late November, Herman blamed the source story for turning out to be negative recruitment material for other coaches.
“Very unfounded articles that again affirm the opinion as a fact,” said Herman. “It is very difficult to defend yourself against this. If you are a competing recruiter, what do you do? You press print. So you say, ‘Look, this is true, it must be true.’ “
Notably, Herman suggested that dealing with these issues internally was not particularly difficult.
“They know the truth,” said Herman. “This is the mitigating factor in this, is that there is a sector of people in this. What is our program, our coaches and people intimately involved in the day-to-day operations of our company. They know the truth. And then there are rumors. “
But, according to Del Conte, those players knowing the truth didn’t matter. And to any extent that anonymous sources impacted recruitment in Texas, since opposing programs used this story against the Longhorns, there is little more destructive to a coaching staff than current players turning on the coach who recruited them in their conversations. with recruits.
While the results in the field provided plenty of justification for paying for the $ 15 million purchase of Herman, the recruitment problems that happened so publicly and the negative recruitment of players behind the scenes clearly illustrated the need to make a change.