Herman Trying to Change a Mindset
Two decades ago, with the state’s flagship university searching for ways to fund new scholarships, professorships, construction and renovation, it launched an ambitious billion-dollar capital campaign with a catchy name.
Officials called it “We’re Texas,” and the slogan quickly caught on. Walter Cronkite added gravitas to those two words by intoning them for a memorable series of TV commercials, and before long they came to represent an entire mindset.
This worked for a while, but gradually the sentiment became less and less convincing.
Mack Brown, Rick Barnes and Charlie Strong each tried in their own ways to battle the “We’re Texas” issue, and each of them failed.
And now, as he is set to conduct his first official practice as UT’s head football coach Tuesday, Tom Herman gets his turn. He cannot do anything about what he calls “the lore of it.” But like many of his predecessors, he is confident he can exterminate every last lingering bit of entitlement, one wind sprint at a time.
“There’s just no room for any of that,” Herman said. “It gets stamped out in such a hurry around here that it really has no time to breathe.”
Whether Herman is right about that will determine the fate of his entire tenure. UT football will not be restored to greatness by an improved defensive scheme, or by creative offensive play-calling, or by a non-disastrous special teams unit, although all of that might help.
The only way the Longhorns will win games again is if they stop believing victories are owed to them. And during his first few months in Austin, that has been the central part of Herman’s message to his new team.
“It is absolutely exhausting to change a culture and to keep your thumb on the human nature side of it,” Herman said. “You feel like the police out there at times as a coach. But you have to set the expectation level early when developing a culture and developing a program.”
So beginning [with Spring Practice], every spot will be earned. Herman never wants a player to look at a starting teammate and wonder, “How did that guy get promoted?” He will lend no credence to last year’s game tapes, or to who talks the biggest game. He does not care for “Twitter tough guys.”
And if during the course of the next month it seems as though he is obsessing too much over minor details, well, that’s the point. Herman said if you do not make a mountain out of every molehill, and stamp it out immediately, you end up with “a program full of molehills.”
[More @ ExpressNews]
