Texas football coach Tom Herman won’t be fired: Will Longhorns regret it?

Tom Herman will remain the Texas football coach.

Texas football will not have a new coach. Tom Herman will remain as the Longhorns head coach after sitting on the hot seat for much of the season.

Herman is 31-18 in four seasons at Texas with zero Big 12 championships and only one title game appearance.

Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte made it official on Saturday when he re-committed to Herman despite being 0-6 over the last two seasons against Oklahoma, Iowa State and TCU. Texas flirted with three-time national champion coach Urban Meyer over the last two weeks but Meyer elected to stay retired and wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself.

Coupled with Meyer’s decision to pass on the Texas football job and Herman’s $25 million buyout and Texas really had no other choice but to stick with Herman for at least one more year and hope he’ll be able to rebuild on the fly.

Texas football may regret retaining Tom Herman

Texas has the No. 17 recruiting class ahead of next week’s early signing day period but lost 2022 top recruit Quinn Ewers and has failed to develop NFL talent during Herman’s tenure. All of that has factored in with Texas being a middle-of-the-pack Big 12 team on his watch.

To be fair, he inherited a struggling program from Charlie Strong who inherited an entitled program from the end of Mack Brown’s tenure. That said, Texas football should not languish in such a prolonged period of being an afterthought while Oklahoma runs the Big 12 and the Longhorns have been passed by Baylor, TCU and Iowa State in the conference hierarchy.

Herman’s buyout prevented Texas football from making a coaching change

Texas had their hands tied with the finances so burning $25 million before even starting a coaching search is not an ideal situation. But it’s not an ideal situation to move forward with Herman either.

Is it possible he can find a quarterback he can win with when he couldn’t do so with Sam Ehlinger? His recruiting track record suggests he can not.

This suggests Texas football will look even worse in 2021 than they did in 2020 when they were a fringe Top 25 team.

Maybe Herman can convince Ehlinger to come back for a bonus season since the senior quarterback won’t lose a year of eligibility because of the funky 2020 season? That would be a big win and give Texas football an advantage heading into next season. It’ll also help if Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell takes a job elsewhere to help their cause against the Cyclones, which is a sentence no Texas football fan ever thought would be a thing.

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