Herman looking outside state for championship-caliber players
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FRISCO, Texas – Texas head coach Tom Herman was stumped for a minute during his shift answering questions from an eager field of reporters on the second of Big 12 Media Days.
He was tasked with giving a number of ‘difference-makers that can win championships’ that were currently on his roster. He understandably wanted to take his time with that one, coming off of a seven-win season that followed one of the most ballyhooed hires of a college football coach in recent memory.
“Some,” he said. “I haven’t tallied up the difference-makers and championship-level guys and I don’t know that it’s fair to give an assessment with the limited time I have to think about it. I do think that there are guys on both sides of the ball – more, if I’m being honest, on the defense than on offense right now – but we’ve also signed a top five recruiting class too, and I have yet to see those guys even play a snap of college football or practice in college.”
Speaking of ballyhooed, his 2018 recruiting class was certainly the stuff Longhorns fans’ dreams are made of. Eleven of Texas’ top-25 players, including six of the top-10, signed with UT. Many of them committed during the summer and signed in December.
Texas is off to another promising start with its 2019 recruiting efforts but nearly half of its commitments have come from out-of-state. Even if last season wasn’t quite the success many had hoped for under Herman, optimism about the direction of the program is still high. Those commitments, however, haven’t been the result of some initiative to capitalize on the Longhorns’ brand outside of the state’s borders.
“It’s not been a conscious effort at all,” Herman said. “It’s just been kind of the way things have shaken out. If we had our druthers, we would get our entire signing class from the state of Texas.
“My analogy is let’s say you have to sign four linebackers. There’s four in the state of Texas that you can win a national championship with, based on your evaluation … Maybe one grew up wearing maroon pajamas, another one is Catholic and wants to go to Notre Dame. You still have to sign four, so if you’re not sure the fifth-best one in the state is championship-worthy, that’s when you cast your net out-of-state. I think that’s what we’ve done this year and it just so happens that net has snagged a few more guys earlier than in previous years.”
Helping to attract catches to the net has been bait that current Longhorns players have provided.
Senior defensive lineman Chris Nelson came to Texas from Lakeland, Fla. Even though his personal decision to come to UT didn’t have anything to do with Herman, his experience with him has become a valuable recruiting tool for the program.
“You’ve got to make the guys feel comfortable. That’s what it was for me,” he said. “When the new guys come in they think I’m from Texas because I fit in so much, but when they find out I’m from Florida, they’re like, 'Oh man, you’re from way out there?' I just explain that they can always come over and hang out.
“A big thing is when recruits see the way [the staff] interacts with players. They tell them when they come to the locker room to ask players questions. The coaches let them know that they keep it real with us, so when recruits talk to us, I think that’s what gets them to come here.”
Texas has a top-15 recruiting class heading into the fall and nine of its 12 commitments are four-star prospects. As Herman said, it’s still to be determined how many of those players are of championship pedigree, but now he’ll at least have felt personally responsible for however many – or lack thereof – he ultimately ends up with.
“I do think we have some, but I think every coach that sits up here would tell you that they don’t have enough,” he said. “The [coaches] that are playing for and winning national championships, too. I do think we’re getting closer and closer to those elite programs in terms of the necessary elite, championship-caliber talent.”
