Meet Possible Candidate Tom Herman

How Tom Herman's Houston unleashes underdog speed
By Ian Boyd  @Ian_A_Boyd on Sep 16, 2015, 12:54p 8







Im in. Mensa member so he may be overqualified for our fanbase. check out his weekly presser above.




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Ohio State's former offensive coordinator knew exactly the kind of Texas talent he'd have available at UH, and early results suggest he knows exactly what to do with it, too.

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After a brilliant run at Ohio State paired with early success away from Urban Meyer's oversight, Tom Herman is a head coach on the rise.

Herman's initial climb through the ranks was quick and local. While working for several teams in Texas, Herman was recruiting and coaching Houston athletes, which would undoubtedly made UH an attractive job offer later.

"I learned football from (then-offensive coordinator) Greg Davis at the University of Texas," he says. "That was back in the I-formation days, and they were handing the ball to Ricky Williams 35 times a game in iso and power. That's what I believed in.

"(At Sam Houston State), I had some experience with a shotgun spread offense."

That changed everything.

Herman took his spread know-how and Texas ties to Iowa State, where his career almost stagnated. After improving Iowa State's Offensive S&P+ rank from 105th in 2008 to 42nd in 2009, the Cyclone offense crashed to 83rd in 2009 and 101st in 2010. Meyer plucked Herman from the wreckage, and they combined to guide the power spread offense that just won a national championship.

Houston showcased Art Briles, Kevin Sumlin and Dana Holgorsen before Herman. His strategic philosophy is better suited to maximizing talent at a place like Ohio State than generating advantages for a program like Iowa State. While that part seems a strange fit, Herman was uniquely experienced to know what might be possible at UH. Two games in, the team is 2-0 with a 34-31 upset at Bobby Petrino's Louisville.

The situation at Houston
Herman has explained his staff philosophy as being about finding coaches who shared his philosophy, knew how to recruit, and could build strong connections with players.


This consisted of snatching up assistants from previous stops, rescuing a few from Texas and landing one of the top up-and-coming defensive coordinators, Utah State's Todd Orlando. Picking up where now-Wisconsin DC Dave Aranda had left off, Orlando's defenses finished sixth in Defensive S&P+ in 2013 and 32nd in 2014.

"I wanted to base out of a 3-4, because I knew it was always a big challenge for me game-planning against teams that were really good out of that," Herman said of Orlando.

Much of the talent produced by Texas comes from the Houston area, the Southeastern "Golden Triangle" and East Texas. Since Houston is in the middle of one of the richest grounds in the country, the level of athlete who will accept a Cougar scholarship is pretty high. Every year that region produces dozens of athletic players who are overlooked because of size, academics or some marginal flaw.

With a hard-working staff that knows the state well, Houston can eat well by simply snatching up two- and three-star players it's carefully evaluated in its own backyard.

 

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Early in the 2016 cycle, UH landed commitments from the state's two top-rated defensive tackle prospects, Ed Oliver and Jordan Elliot. While Elliot has decommitted and no one is sure Oliver will stick, the national press and excitement these verbal pledges generated were invaluable. However things go down, it's looking like Houston will gain a talent advantage over most of its non-power peers.

Herman also walked into a talented roster. The Cougars settled on QB Greg Ward Jr. as the man in 2014, when he threw for 2,010 yards and ran for 537 after taking the job midseason. Ward is small at 5'11, 185 pounds, but his skill set is perfectly suited to Herman's smashmouth spread offense. The team is also loaded on defense with what is arguably one of the better secondaries in the country, led by lockdown corner and likely NFL Draft pick William Jackson III.

Herman's smashmouth spread and accompanying D
Despite his membership in Mensa, Herman isn't really trying to outsmart anyone on the field. His strategy is about putting athletes in position to make plays through simplicity and repetition.

The offense is geared around inside zone and power-O, run schemes that look to get downhill and plunge the ball through the A and B gaps. Herman will sprinkle in play action and run/pass options to punish defensive tactics for sneaking run defenders into the box. Herman looks to do less with more, emphasizing execution and mixing concepts in different formations to give his QB answers.

The 2015 Houston passing game gets mileage out of a snag concept. UH runs it either as play action or as a quick, three-step dropback pattern:






The Cougars prefer to use Demarcus Ayers (H on this diagram) to run bubble screens, sweeps and flat routes, as his speed and change of direction make him difficult to cover on quick routes. However, they'll move players around and use different positions to run different routes within the concept, while the read is still largely the same for the QB.

Like at Ohio State, Herman prefers to have a sixth blocker in the form of a tight end/H-back, who can allow the Cougars to run two-back power or get another double team blocker on a run. But he'll also use Ayers and quick passes as options attached to these runs, in lieu of trying to smash faces all the time.

Like most smashmouth spread teams (Auburn, Clemson, Ohio State, etc.), Herman has some vertical play action designed to allow the QB to either read for a deep throw or scramble if everything is covered.





Herman's defensive coach has a similar strategy. Orlando's Cougar defense lines up in a very flexible 3-4. It can form either a true 3-4 or a 4-3, depending on the call. The Cougars have the ability to play either in a variety of different ways.

First is their base quarters (four deep defenders) defense, which they often run with eight defenders in coverage. That makes them pretty sound against pass options and play action by giving the defense enough numbers to control the edges without committing safeties as run-first defenders.






If the Cougars want a four-man pass rush, they can blitz the R linebacker, or really anybody, while still using the outside linebackers as edge defenders. When they want to bring more pressure, they'll mix things up with single-deep man blitzes, such as this strong safety edge pressure:






Blitzes like this allow the Cougars to use their talented secondary to great effect. But the scheme is very versatile, and by teaching different players to play multiple roles, they can disguise things while still playing mostly the same defense.

If Herman can load up the roster with Texas athletes, these playbooks allow his staff to put them in position to rely on their speed and ability, all while still playing sound schemes with built-in answers for most opponents they face.




Tom Herman.

 

Seems like he likes where he is. I wonder if he would come here?

 

I wonder why his offense tanked in 2009 and 2010. We're there injuries or turnovers or what?

 

Bird in the hand I suppose. I think our issue is what we discussed. We remember Jimbos boring but effective offense under nick and les. He was definitely hamstrung because those are 2 of the most conservative HCs youll find. He was our OC in 2003 . And won it all again in 2013.

at iowa st? proably because its iowa state.

 

TOM HERMAN'S HOUSTON COUGARS AREN'T JUST RELEVANT, THEY'RE COMPELLING


BY SEAN PENDERGAST
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2015 | 5 HOURS AGO


Tom Herman’s energetic coaching style has the Cougars in the midst of a special season.
Marco Torres
On a crisp November night at a sold-out TDECU Stadium, Memphis kicker Jake Elliott trotted out onto the field with seconds remaining in the game. It would be up to the junior from Western Springs, Illinois, to act as the human fire extinguisher, to squelch the furious comeback that the University of Houston Cougars had mounted in the fourth quarter.

Mere minutes earlier, the Cougars had trailed 34-14, but thanks to a combination of guts and Memphis turnovers, they now led 35-34. Elliott, though, could erase Memphis’s egregious errors of the previous 15 minutes with one swing of his right leg, and in the process hand the Cougars their first loss of the season and head coach Tom Herman the first loss of his young head coaching career.

The snap was good, the hold was smooth, but the kick went wide right, and the Cougars celebrated. They’d officially completed the comeback, the biggest in a fourth quarter for any college football team all season. The box score, which merely read “Elliott missed 48 yd FG,” can never fully convey the impact of that missed kick.

In today’s college football world, relevance is a fixed pie, and only a small portion of it gets doled out to the non-Power Five conferences, like the American Athletic Conference, in which Houston and Memphis reside. Despite a season in which they’ve knocked off a good SEC team in Ole Miss, that missed field goal slammed Memphis’s window shut.

The Cougars, on the other hand, through toughness, opportunism and a little luck, lived to fight another day. The Cougars aren’t just relevant, they’re compelling. And they’re winning. Welcome to the Tom Herman era of Houston football.

When Herman arrived in January, he brought with him a championship pedigree, having just finished a three-year run as offensive coordinator for the defending national champion Ohio State Buckeyes. Waiting for him in Houston was a roster with some talent but very little direction. Herman’s predecessor, Tony Levine, was a nice guy who had an exasperating knack for doing two things — making questionable hires on his coaching staff and losing enough close games to get him fired.

As is usually the case during a regime change, the new head coach brings an energy that is the polar opposite of the previous head coach. Herman ran a training camp heavy on contact and accountability and short on patience. Results came quickly, as the Cougars were able to get a huge win by a field goal against an ACC foe in Louisville in the second week of the season, a Louisville team that lost by an identical margin to top-ranked Clemson the following week.

The Cougar train rolled unblemished through September, October and that cool November night against Memphis, the only loss being a three-point setback last weekend at Connecticut. They did it, generally speaking, using holdovers from the Levine era. Quarterback Greg Ward Jr. was a Levine recruit and is now a Heisman Trophy candidate. Cornerback William Jackson III was a Levine recruit, and he might be the first cornerback taken in the NFL Draft this spring. Hell, running back Kenneth Farrow is in his third year as a captain.

So what’s the difference? Why is this same group now winning these close games against good teams, and, for the most part, destroying teams they should be destroying? Well, a lot of tactical reasons, but Herman boils it down to one simple, prevailing principle — love. The members of this team love each other, and in a typical legendary Herman soundbite, the head coach defined exactly what “love” means.

“It’s a ‘kiss you on the cheek, squeeze you real right and tell you that you have my heart in your hands’ kind of love, brother,” Herman clarifies. “Not ‘Love ya bro,’ or ‘Love ya dawg’ with the one-handed, ass-out hug. We’re not into that around here. We’re into real genuine love.”

As is usually the case, Herman finds the perfect way to convey his message with a combination of humor and logic. Having just been part of a championship team, he knows the importance of team chemistry.

“I’ve seen really, really talented teams that don’t care about each other and are average, or maybe above average is about as good as you’re going to get,” Herman said.

Now, let’s not forget that the Cougars have been down this road of relevance fairly recently. If you go back in time and cross the treacherous bridge of the Tony Levine era, you land in 2011, the final season of current Texas A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin’s four-year run as head coach of the Cougars.

That season, on the strength of a prolific, video-game-style offense built around Case Keenum’s right arm, Houston went undefeated through the regular season before getting smoked in the C-USA title game by Southern Miss. By the time that team was beating downtrodden Penn State in a January bowl game, Sumlin had already moved into his office in College Station.

This iteration of Cougar football, though, seems better equipped under Herman to take on the monsters of college football when that day comes, because, quite simply, Herman cares deeply about defense, something Sumlin always seemed to view as a speed bump on the way to the next offensive series.

When asked to compare the various facets of his team to children, Herman quipped, “The defense is, by far, my favorite kid. Let’s make no mistake about that, I love great defense. Every championship team I’ve ever coached or been on has had a championship-level defense.

“No team ever accepted a championship trophy and said, ‘We won this because we out-finessed the competition.’ That’s never happened in this sport, and hopefully it never will.”

You don’t go from average to great with a mere personality makeover, though. The football gods don’t operate that way. Adversity strikes, and Herman’s ability to manage within chaos has been perhaps his most exemplary trait. When the offensive line was ravaged by injuries early in the season, he and his staff coached up a handful of true freshmen who’ve kept the offense moving.

“Six months ago they were having to figure out what tie to wear to the prom,” Herman joked. “Now they’re blocking college football defensive linemen.”

Managing on the fly in games has been a Herman strength as well. In that Memphis game, the Cougars’ best player, and perhaps the best quarterback in the country, Ward, went down with a leg injury in the first half, so in stepped transfer Kyle Postma, who’d been running routes as a receiver earlier in the season. All he did was throw for 236 yards and score the winning touchdown.

Of course, Herman is no stranger to substitute quarterbacks playing like stars, having been the offensive coordinator for Cardale Jones’s magical three-game run to a title in the 2014 postseason at Ohio State.

For Houston, the most difficult part of the Tom Herman era will be extending it for as long as humanly possible. Just two months into his first season on the job, Herman’s name was already showing up on media “short lists” for high-profile jobs like USC, Miami and South Carolina.

In recent years, Houston has served as a launch point for head coaching careers, specifically Sumlin at A&M and Art Briles at Baylor. Truth be told, that’s not the worst thing in the world. There are maybe a dozen programs in the country that can sleep at night knowing their coach is theirs and nobody else’s. Everyone else is on some form of constant notice, keeping one eye open knowing a pile of money could lure their guy away.
The University of Houston is one of those schools, and there’s no shame in that. Other schools wanting your coach means that you hired well.

However, the school doesn’t have to take outside interest in its head coach lying down, and to that end, the University of Houston Board of Regents struck a pre-emptive blow to Herman suitors last Thursday, approving an increase in the head coach’s annual salary from $1.35 million to $3 million. The raise would easily make Herman the highest-paid coach outside of the Power Five conferences.

In the meantime, the best way to keep Herman over on Scott Street is to keep winning games and keep scheduling strong matchups outside of the conference. To that end, the Cougars open 2016 at NRG Stadium against the University of Oklahoma. If they finish 2015 strong, with a New Year’s Day bowl win over a Power Five conference foe, could they start the 2016 season in, say, the top 15? With Ward returning for his senior year, it’s not just possible, it’s likely.

For now, the Herman Plan is being executed flawlessly in 2015. The Cougars’ incoming recruiting class may be one of their best ever, and ticket sales are brisk. The Memphis game was a sellout, and the game against Navy on November 27 is already sold out as well. In perhaps the ultimate sign of relevance, J.J. Watt was spotted on the sidelines during the Memphis game. (Herman’s weekly invitation to Beyoncé remains open.)

The Cougars built TDECU Stadium to send a message about how serious they are about having an elite football program. A few months in, it appears Herman may be an elite head coach taking the program to places they haven’t been since the Southwest Conference existed.

And who knew that all you need is love? Well, love and defense.

Listen to Sean Pendergast on SportsRadio 610 from 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays. Also follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/SeanCablinasian or email him at [email protected].

 

I don't care what anyone says. I've been saying it from the start that he's the guy we need to target. His gameplan beat the gumps in the playoff last year with talent he helped recruit. Lock him up now before Texas or USCw start zeroing in.

 

Tirk! Chill out on the walls of text!! LMAO
Kidding... the more I have read about this guy, the more I like him for LSU. I fear getting him could be quite a challenge though. Seems like the Cougars will fight hard to keep him there.

 

Problem is our company line has been we are getting someone more proven. Im trying to get alleva to change his philosophy a bit.