Florida Atlantic's Tom Herman visits Texas roots as he nears his return to college coaching

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Florida Atlantic's Tom Herman opened the summer of his return to college coaching in Texas, maybe a couple of football fields from where he led the Longhorns in the Big 12 championship game almost five years ago.

It's been about half that amount of time since Herman was fired at Texas, and he wasn't very sentimental about American Athletic Conference media days being so close to AT&T Stadium and a couple of hundred miles from the Texas campus in Austin.

“It’s a hotel and a city,” Herman said Tuesday. “We loved our stay in Texas, but I’m really excited about being at Florida Atlantic. If they’d had this thing in Phoenix, I’d have had the same emotions, or Atlanta.”

Herman opened up a little more when he wasn't on the podium in front of the cameras, but even then, there were boundaries.

“There will be a time and a place for me to talk about my time at Texas,” he said with a smile. “You’ll probably read it in a book at some point.”

Herman replaced Charlie Strong at Texas in 2017 and beat Oklahoma in the Red River rivalry a year later before losing to the Sooners later in the 2018 season in the Big 12 title game at the home of the Dallas Cowboys.

Texas went 7-3 in the pandemic-altered 2020 season, was mired in a racially charged debate over the origins of the school song “The Eyes of Texas” and had been losing commitments from key recruits when athletic director Chris Del Conte fired Herman three weeks after issuing a vague statement that indicated he would return in 2021. Steve Sarkisian was hired the same day.

“I’m not going to hang my head and be ashamed of our record from when I was a head coach,” said Herman, who was 32-18 with four bowl victories at Texas. “Is it to our standards? Absolutely not. We’re still proud of it and plan on building on it here at Florida Atlantic.”

Herman had just turned 40 when he made his head coaching debut at Houston, which was in the American Athletic then but is joining the Big 12 this year. He was considered a hot young prospect when the Longhorns hired him.

There's a little more gray now, but the 48-year-old Herman is skeptical whether the Texas job has anything to do with that.

“I’ve got a 19-year-old, a 16-year-old and a 10-year-old,” Herman said. “That ages me a lot more than being at Texas or Houston or Florida Atlantic.”

Florida Atlantic's debut in the AAC is a return to the conference for Herman, who won won 18 of his first 19 games at Houston in 2015-16 with top-10 victories over Florida State and Oklahoma. A late swoon in his second season didn't keep the Longhorns from calling after ending Strong's stint at three years, the shortest for a Texas coach in 80 years.

Herman lasted one year longer, then spent a season as an analyst with the Chicago Bears before a season in the TV booth with the CBS Sports Network. He called his first game a year ago, just up the road from Arlington in Denton, home of North Texas, another of the six new AAC members this season.

“I saw the band come in. I saw the cheerleaders come in. I saw the student section come in. I saw the kids on the field with the coaches during pregame warmup,” Herman said. “And I texted my wife one very simple statement, and that was, ‘I miss college football.’”

He's back, and leading the program Lane Kiffin parlayed into another chance at a big-time program in Mississippi. If Herman isn't going to talk about his Texas days much, he certainly won't muse on whether this job could do for him what it did for Kiffin. He's basically reliving the Houston experience.

“It feels eerily similar,” Herman said. “We’ve got a bunch of two-star, no-star dudes that their whole life, they’ve been told they’re an inch too short, a tenth of a second too slow, 20 pounds too light. They’ve been under-recruited, underappreciated, a chip on their shoulder.”

Even if he wasn't going to say it, their coach came to Texas probably feeling much the same way.

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