2020 hindsight: 5 coaches Texas could have hired instead of Tom Herman

What could have been for Texas football had they not hired Tom Herman and went with one of these coaches instead.

It has been a frustrating first four years with Tom Herman as the Texas football coach. Deemed as the next great coaching prodigy under Urban Meyer, Herman had remarkable success in his two years leading the Houston Cougars. He went 22-4 overall, including earning the Group of 5’s New Year’s Six bowl bid in his first year in 2015. However, in four years with Texas, he is 31-18 overall and has yet to win a Big 12 Championship Game.

Herman has been on the hot seat but after Texas’ flirtation with Meyer fizzled, coupled with his $25 million buyout, Herman may get another year on the job. However, it’s hard not to play the what-if game and wonder how Texas football would have fared if they hired one of these coaches instead of Herman in the first place.

Texas football would be in a better position if they hired David Shaw

Let’s be real. There is a chance Stanford Cardinal head coach David Shaw may never want to leave Palo Alto willingly. This is his alma mater after all, where he played wide receiver under coaching legends Dennis Green and Bill Walsh in the early 1990s. Shaw returned to Stanford on his predecessor Jim Harbaugh’s staff in 2007 and replaced him as head coach back in 2011.

Though the Cardinal had a rough 2019, as well as a middling coronavirus-shortened 2020 campaign, Stanford won at least eight games in his first eight seasons as his alma mater’s head coach. This included three Pac-12 Championships (2012-13, 2015), as well as five shares of Pac-12 North division crowns. He is rapidly approaching 100 career wins all-time leading Stanford.

The reason Shaw cracks this list is he has been linked to other jobs pretty much annually for the last half-decade. He is one of only a handful of Power 5 head coaches certainly capable of making the leap to the NFL if he felt so inclined. He had spent nine seasons as an assistant in the NFL with the then-Oakland Raiders, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Baltimore Ravens prior to 2006.

Would Shaw ever willingly leave Stanford? It is highly unlikely, but his track record up to 2016 was certainly worthy of him being considered Charlie Strong’s successor in Austin. 2016 would have been a great exit point for Shaw, as that was his last 10-win season in Palo Alto up to this point. If he can land top-tier talent at an academic power like Stanford, imagine what he could do at Texas.