Flingin’ the bling

Give Tom Herman credit — if you’re gonna blow ridiculous money on football lockers, don’t be coy about it.

Pictures of the new Longhorn football lockers went viral Friday not long after they hit social media. Many on Twitter lamented that despite the high-end perk, college athletes still don’t get paid. Or that last year Texas lost to lowly Kansas for the first time in 78 years. Or that this was a new high – or low – to the college football arms race. Such snark didn’t matter to Herman. He got exactly the response he was hoping for.

“The only reaction I care about to be honest is our players and our recruits,” Herman told FOX Sports on Tuesday. “I don’t care about Twitter’s reaction or whatever social media’s reaction is. Our players and the recruits absolutely loved it. The recruits, especially those that have been a lot of places around the country, have said, ‘Coach, there’s nothing even close to it around the country.’

“So, mission accomplished on that one.”

You’re the richest athletic program in America.  People already think you’re arrogant, so what do you have to lose by acting that way?

Texas’ facilities, which were among the best in college football back when Herman was a graduate assistant, had been surpassed in the past decade as TV money flooded into Power 5 programs. Barbershop rooms in the football facility along with virtual reality rooms, waterfalls and jumbotrons for the indoor complex aren’t uncommon anymore.

“Texas is one of the most prestigious schools, and we’re kinda out of date right now,” said safety P.J. Locke, a one-time Oregon commit. “This facility was one of the greatest back then but then everyone upgraded and we stayed here. Herman is this new-school guy and he has to get facilities back on top.”

Senior defensive tackle Poona Ford was wowed by the new locker and is convinced it matters in recruiting today. “At my high school, every male sports team shared a locker room in that one field house, and if I see that coming out of high school, I’m thinking, ‘Dang, that’s pretty sweet.’ That could be the reason why they commit here,” Ford said.

But could that really be a reason why one player would pick Texas over A&M or OU?

“Yeah,” Ford said. “Everything matters.”

Hell, it might even work.

Golden showers

In something straight out of Derek Dooley’s Personal Hygiene 101, evidently this is a real thing for Texas football.

Went to take a leak in Moncrief and this was hanging above the toilet. Tom Herman's attention to detail is real 😳 pic.twitter.com/FoAMbkf56K

— Anwar Richardson (@AnwarRichardson) April 11, 2017

How would you like to be called out for being a bad guy about the color of your urine?  My only remaining question is whether Herman’s got support staffers going around checking the hue of his players’ pee.

Pardon our progress.

Tom Herman does a little PR.

.@CoachTomHerman taking a sledgehammer to the old #Longhorns locker room 😂 pic.twitter.com/qTihY73UgM

— Alex Dunlap (@AlexDunlapNFL) April 7, 2017

Gee, I can see Greg McGarity and Kirby Smart laying the wood just like that for the new west end capital project.  Can’t you?

Seriously, watching Georgia and Texas over the next few years is going to make for an interesting controlled experiment.  How much of a difference does opening the checkbook — really opening the checkbook — make in this day and age?  And how much bang for the buck does what an athletic department spends the money on get you?

“I haven’t been told ‘no’ yet.”

Man, they’ve really been roughing it in the Texas locker room.

One new Texas staffer had a bit of a “wow” moment in January when he realized the locker room had no sound system. Instead, players were blasting their music via one small Bluetooth speaker an offensive lineman brought in to share.

The Texas locker room upgrade is now looking to make the facility more technologically advanced with individual video screens and more connectivity.

Talk about your first world problems.

“We don’t sign backups here at the University of Texas.”

Sure, Tom Herman signed the lowest-rated recruiting class at Texas ever, but at least there was science behind it.

However, it seems there was actually some strategy that went into Texas’ 2017 class. Herman said in a recent interview with Longhorn Network that he and his staff found research regarding first-year head coaches’ classes that prompted them to change their approach a bit. Below are some of Herman’s comments during the interview, which were transcribed via Football Scoop.

“We knew through all the metrics, all the analytics, all the numbers that point to most of the time in years of transition in coaching staffs, that signing class has the highest rate of attrition – meaning kids that quit – has the highest rate of off-field issues including academics, drugs and social, and has the highest rate of guys that can’t play, and don’t ever see the field.”

Whatevs, dude.  Just explain how proclaiming that you don’t sign backups — “None of these guys were signed for depth or anything other than we believe that they can either play now and help us win championships…” — turn right around to say that one of the main focuses of your 2017 signing class was to add guys who can provide depth, as opposed to ones who would see the field right away is anything other than a roundabout way of pretending you don’t really need those all-star recruits you were chasing and will continue to keep chasing.

Better stick the landing a helluva lot better with next year’s class.  At least that way you won’t have to spend as much time spinning to defend it.

You know you’re not having a great signing day when…

… you say this.

Recruiting rankings "don't crack a kid's chest open and look at his heart" – Tom Herman https://t.co/PIrdaq6elG

— MK (@yellmk) February 2, 2017

Luckily for Tom, the Big 12 couldn’t recruit its way out of an open paper bag this year.

Today, in just win, baby

Tom Herman hired former Baylor football staffer Casey Horny, who was among several at Baylor who took to defending his former boss on Twitter, something that many UT fans found troubling, to say the least.

Well, not to worry, peeps.  Texas athletic director Mike Perrin has investigated the matter and pronounced it resolved.

Texas athletic director Mike Perrin said in a statement Tuesday that the hiring of former Baylor football staffer Casey Horney “is in total alignment with our culture of integrity.”

How was this accomplished?  It was easy, once Perrin identified the real problem.

“Like others, I question coach Horny supporting some commentary on social media,” Perrin said. “After further discussion with coach Horny, he understands such actions will not be tolerated at Texas.”

Only in the world of college football could social media be seen as a bigger cultural threat than sexual assault.

What’s the use of gettin’ sober…

Texas’ wins total didn’t increase from 2015 to 2016, but its beer drinking did — by a lot.

Alcohol sales spiked more than 70 percent during the 2016 season compared to the previous year as Texas generated $3.1 million in revenue from beer, wine and liquor sold at football games.

Thereby proving that mediocrity is a thirsty state of affairs.

Pay to not play

To paraphrase Richard Pryor, electing to pay Tom Herman’s $2.5 million buyout instead of scheduling a couple of home and homes with Houston in football and basketball is Gawd’s way of telling Texas it has too much money.

“Now the GAs have GAs.”

In light of my post yesterday about Saban, this piece about Tom Herman looking to remake the personnel staff at Texas is fascinating on a number of levels.

For instance, see if this sounds familiar:

There are several areas in which Texas lags behind national powers that Herman would like to fix, as he expressed to Dan Patrick this week when discussing recruiting.

“We need to stay competitive with the elite teams in the country — the Alabamas, the Ohio States, the Clemsons of the world — in terms of our facilities and our resources and support staff and recruiting staff and all that,” Herman told Patrick.

The last two areas are the most important in the short term, as the lack of a large support staff and recruiting staff contributed, at least in some part, to Charlie Strong’s failed tenure in Austin.

And the failed tenure of Mack Brown before him.

In fact, Texas was one of the last two schools in the Big 12 to hire a Director of Player Personnel in 2013. At the press conference to create that position, Brown admitted that “we’ve kinda been mom and popping it around here for a long time.”

The ‘Horns also didn’t have a football-specific strength and conditioning coach or a nutritionist until that time. Mom and popping it indeed.

Under Strong, it was much of the same, though there were some reports that former athletic director Steve Patterson wasn’t always willing to give him the resources he needed.

It’s going to be interesting to watch and compare where Georgia and Texas go over the next few years.  Sort of a massive controlled experiment.