Texas Football: How Does Herman Turn Bowl Magic Into Consistency?
Looking at the last four bowl games Tom Herman has coached in, it's hard to argue with his success.
In the 2015 Peach Bowl the then-Houston head coach came up with a gameplan to take down powerhouse Florida State.
Two years later in his first bowl game at Texas (he did not coach in the Cougars' 2016 postseason game since he had already taken the job in Austin), Herman put a chokehold on Missouri and the No. 1 offense in the SEC.
Everybody remembers what happened last year in the Sugar Bowl against Georgia. Meanwhile, the Longhorns' performance in a 38-10 win over No. 11 Utah may have been his best yet.
So what makes Herman so good in bowls?
"I don’t know," he said after his fourth and most-recent bowl victory. "I have really good players. We, again, have always had kind of a philosophy of having fun during that time and working when it’s time to work and having fun when it’s time to have fun. Because again, you’re talking about a month in between ball games."
His players always seem to come out playing loose and in all four bowl games of his coaching career so far, his team has clearly been the more physical. But Texas fans have seen this story before, and it didn't have a happy ending.
Last year Texas rolled over the Georgia Bulldogs in what many thought was its official arrival on the national title contender scene.
Everybody remembers Sam Ehlinger standing on the stage in the Superdome and proclaiming the program to be back in an emphatic manner.
Fast forward 10 months, and a five-loss regular season burned out all the goodwill and good feelings the program earned that day in New Orleans and eventually led to replacing not one, but two coordinators in an effort to jump-start the program.
Now he hits the offseason with the goal of rolling the momentum of another blowout bowl victory into sustained success for the following year.
"Well, we’ve got to be healthy," Herman said. "We’re not to the point yet where our depth is where it needs to be. We’ve got to develop that depth to do that, and it’s got to be a mentality that permeates the entire organization. It can and it will, and that’s my job is to make sure—I don’t have all the answers right now on New Year’s Eve as to how to get that done. But I’m excited for the offseason to challenge these guys to understand what they are capable of when they do play that way."
As for Ehlinger, while he was clearly in a good mood following his team's dominating performance, he refrained from any bold statements afterword.
"And so I think that it’s a great—I don’t know how to word this—but I’m not going to do this again (laughter)," Ehlinger said. "I’ll leave it at that."
"Smart move," Herman said directly after.
The program earned its right to celebrate New Year's Eve in San Antonio as a bowl champion, but most in Austin understand the work needed to make the program into a consistent winner is just beginning and it's going to be a long offseason on the Forty Acres.
