re: The Official Coaching Search Thread- updates in OP

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People make a big deal about the system you run. But I've learned though the years that your system has to marry your talent. One of my proudest seasons is when we went 12-0 in my first year at Ohio State in 2012. Philosophically, we wanted to be balanced. But we couldn't throw the ball. We had a good line, a beast at tailback in Carlos Hyde and a freak at quarterback in Braxton Miller. It was one of my proudest achievements in coaching. We didn't try to fit a square peg in a round hole. And that's how we're going to approach stuff at Houston. You start with a vision of, "Here's who we are. Here's our beliefs. Here's how we play." What our vision may be is going to be entirely dependent on the players we have.

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For 100 years in football, no one has won a game because of their finesse. I don't know any team that ever won a championship while playing soft. So, when we got here, physicality was nonnegotiable.

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One thing that I've gotten much better at is confrontation with my assistant coaches. I've learned that it's O.K., you just can't ever make it personal. I think that's one thing that you learn from someone like Urban, or if you've heard Nick Saban talk. It's never personal. It's never, "You stupid jerk, why did I hire you?" The way to handle it is, "You're not doing your job. This is what we need you to do. Get it done. These are the expectations."

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Rice didn't have very nice facilities, so I knew which hallways to walk him down and where to hide him—I knew what doors to keep closed so he did not see certain things. Meanwhile, we planned any way we could to polish up the facilities. But during the spring my office phone rang and it's the quarterback's dad. I'm thinking, "Great!" I take the call, and he says, "Coach Herman, my wife and son and I are in the parking lot. Can we come up and spend some time with you?" I said, "Of course," but I'm thinking to myself, "Oh no! Oh god! What do I do?"

So, I spent the next two hours fumbling around, and the kid saw all our warts. I went home that night feeling terrible—a combination of wanting to vomit profusely and curl up in the fetal position. I knew he was getting on a flight to Palo Alto the next day to visit Stanford. I knew what they were going to show him. And I knew that we were done. We had failed. Would we have gotten him? Probably not. But we failed. We did not put our best foot forward.

That quarterback was Andrew Luck.

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One of our best players is William Jackson III, a defensive back from Houston. Earlier this spring, I called out our cornerbacks: "Last time I checked, William can't play left corner and right corner in the same game. So, someone in that group has to step up." Not long after, one of the corners showed up 45 minutes late for one of our summer workouts (where we can work with the kids for two hours a week). I went over, stopped the corners' drills and ripped the whole group, not just the kid who was late—ripped the position coach and William Jackson, too. Then I went over to the safeties and told them that their group had no leadership. I told the defensive backs that I don't trust William Jackson. I learned from Urban, who is just a phenomenal motivator, what truly inspires someone—he digs deep into that. William Jackson wants to be a great leader. I promise you he does, and when you call him out in front of his team and his peers, William Jackson has two ways to go. Either he goes in the tank or he responds. Later that day I had a meeting with him and built him up and told him how much I love him. That's a little peek behind the curtain.

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There's a hallway floor in our facility that is 25 years old. It rains a lot in Houston, so who knows what's under it by now. But a few months ago, the little rubber tiles started to peel up like a potato chip. I said, "Hey, this isn't safe for our athletes." After 10 or 15 emails, I said that I would pay for it. I went to Home Depot, bought a bunch of scrapers and spent a night peeling the tiles back. I was fully prepared to spend my own money to put a floor down. It was for my guys and for recruiting. I peeled up the floor myself because if somebody was going to be angry about it, I didn't want anyone else to get in trouble but me. It actually didn't take me that long, like three or four hours. I stacked the tiles up in the locker room. In a few weeks, we ended up with new floors.

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