At Florida Atlantic, Tom Herman is the underdog again, and he loves it

Tom Herman was frustrated. He was on the phone attempting to pay a bill, kept on hold by customer service. He yelled across the room to ask his wife Michelle if this was really happening.

She asked how long he’d been on hold. It had been seven minutes.

“She’s like, ‘Seven minutes?! Of course this happens!’” Herman recalled.

It was last summer, and for the first time in almost 40 years he wasn’t preparing to coach or play in a football season. He had joined CBS Sports last August as an analyst, after one year as a Chicago Bears analyst that followed his four years as Texas head coach.

“I’d been, like, institutionalized for so long that I didn’t really even know how the ‘real world’ works,” he said. “I didn’t realize all this stuff.”

But without coaching responsibilities, he started eating better, taking better care of himself. He spent more time with his family, enjoying life as a stay-at-home dad. He had his knee replaced a year ago and rehabilitated that. But as the 2022 season went on and he visited stadiums for game broadcasts, he got the itch again. Every coach does.

Now Herman is back on the sideline as the Florida Atlantic head coach. He’s in “paradise,” as FAU calls itself, with its Boca Raton campus less than three miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The men’s basketball team’s run to the Sweet Sixteen has put another spotlight on the school, and the football coach loves it.

Herman stays in a dorm room and rides a black electric scooter to work. His personal record from room to office is three minutes. A bad day is five minutes. The scooter tops out at 15 miles per hour. It’ll be this way until his family moves over from Austin later this year. When he was introduced at a press conference in December, fans and other coaches took notice of how much thinner and younger he looked. Michelle told him, “You look alive again.”

The 47-year-old Herman now dances at practice. He took FAU players to the beach, and they tossed him in the ocean. He dressed in a goofy basketball uniform as the team played some hoops.

He’s no longer in the fishbowl that is the Texas head coaching job, where everyone judged him on everything. He was booted out of the spotlight and is the underdog again, a position in which he’s always thrived.

“I love it here,” Herman said. “This place has all the ingredients. It’s an up-and-coming product.”

Sun’s Out Guns Out ☀️🌴
Had to take Coach for a swim 🌊#WinningInParadise #TriCountyTakeover
— FAU Football (@FAUFootball) March 3, 2023

In some ways, it’s a surprise that Herman is here, given his resume. He has won 71 percent of his games and finished in the AP Top 25 four times in six seasons as a head coach at Houston and Texas, with two New Year’s Six bowl wins. He was 22-4 at Houston and 32-18 at Texas. It’s hard to ask what “went wrong” at Texas when he had a better record than his predecessor and, thus far, his successor.

But Herman’s run at Texas did have its share of issues. A ranked Longhorns team lost to an unranked opponent seven times, more than any team in the country. They were 3-4 as a top-10 team. He never lost a game by more than 19 points but only won three Big 12 games by more than 20. They thrived when they were doubted or counted out but struggled when people expected success.

Herman also drew questions about his maturity, like when he mocked Missouri quarterback Drew Lock during a bowl game or flipped middle fingers to Longhorn Network cameras. He stood by his players during the controversy over “The Eyes of Texas,” an admirable move that upset certain boosters. His tenure ended with the school trying to hire Herman’s old boss, Urban Meyer, failing, then firing Herman after the bowl game.

Herman pauses and winces when asked about Texas, perhaps holding back what he really wants to say.

“I don’t think it’s probably best to get into all of that,” he said. “That was going on three years ago, and I love where I’m at now. We had a great and successful run there. I did learn a lot of things and things I’ve already done differently.”

When the Texas experience ended, he had to step away. He didn’t want to go be a coordinator or a position coach. He took an analyst job with the Bears to see what the NFL experience was like and how that business works. Head coach Matt Nagy was fired after the season. Herman would’ve considered another NFL gig had one presented itself. Colleges gauged his interest. He decided to stay home, then do a little TV work in the fall.

part-time Head Coach, full-time Certified Bucket🏀🌴#WinningInParadise #GoOwls
— FAU Football (@FAUFootball) March 1, 2023

All the while, FAU athletic director Brian White had his eye on Herman. White has athletics administration in his blood. The family includes his father Kevin (former Notre Dame and Duke AD), brother Danny (Tennessee AD), brother Mike (Georgia men’s basketball coach) and sister Mariah (SMU assistant AD). He took the FAU AD job amid Lane Kiffin’s success and hired Willie Taggart when Kiffin went to Ole Miss. White fired Taggart after three disappointing seasons and began another search. He cast a wide net to see who was interested.

White and the search committee talked with about a dozen candidates, but when Herman reciprocated interest, things moved quickly. He was the only coach brought in to visit in person and became the head coach that day on Dec. 1.

“We knew if we could get Tom Herman, that would be a big coup for us,” White said. “We brought him in and were blown away. … Tom stood apart not only in the interview but also with his resume, references and experience he brings to the table.”

It was well-known that Herman wanted to get back into coaching. His name popped up in connection with several jobs from industry sources. For Herman, what he wanted had changed. He’d spent his whole career climbing the mountain, from graduate assistant to FCS coach to Group of 5 to Power 5 coordinator to Ohio State coordinator to Houston and Texas head coach. He had to recalibrate what to do next.

“Our priorities are a little bit different now at this stage in my career and in our lives as a family,” he said. “First, we wanted somewhere our family would be happy living, and second was, are they set up for success? That’s usually a tough combination to find in college football. That was the biggest attraction. Those were our two big boxes a place needed to check.”

FAU’s football program, started by Howard Schnellenberger, is barely two decades old. Kiffin finally tapped into its potential by winning 11 games and a conference championship in 2017 and 2019. The new Schmidt Athletic Complex football building opened in 2020, and the Owls will move to the American Athletic Conference this year. Things are moving up.

“UCF is a great comparison, they’re probably 10 years ahead of us, turning that university from what was seen as a commuter school to a vibrant on-campus life with success on the field,” Herman said. “Next thing you know, they’re invited to the Big 12. That blueprint and TCU are ones you study. It starts at the campus level. You have to engage students and generate school spirit.”

The men’s basketball team’s run to the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend has helped. FAU sometimes has to inform people in Boca Raton that the school is there, but seven basketball games late in the season sold out, White said. The Owls became a hot ticket and got people to games who had never been before. Herman went to games and engaged with students and fans.

“He’s in the student section, comes back a few games later and buys pretzels and hot dogs for the students,” White said. “He’s probably working 14- or 16-hour days but goes out of his way to do things to help us grow our fan base.”

This isn’t Texas. Herman is not dealing with scores of boosters who expect a certain kind of tradition. He’s working to create that first generation. Herman joked that all three places he has been a head coach are basketball schools now: Houston and Texas are also in the Sweet 16.

“We had to do the same thing at Houston, and by the time we finished there, we had James Harden and J.J. Watt and Roger Clemens on the sideline with sold-out stadiums,” Herman said. “I know it can be done. It takes a lot of carnival barking. ‘Step right up and see the Owls!’ That’s part of the job at a place like this, and I’m happy to do it.”

He makes a lot of comparisons to Houston, a program in a prime location that gets overshadowed by the bigger schools in the state. Herman is in the underdog position again. He went 5-0 as the betting underdog at Houston, and his first two Texas teams were 8-1-1 against the spread as an underdog.

“I just really like being around some of these underdog-type young men that were maybe overlooked in recruiting,” Herman said of this FAU team. “They were probably told they were an inch too short, a step too slow, this, that or the other. They’re out to prove something.”

So is their coach, out to prove he’s still a winner with a lot of coaching left ahead of him, out to prove he learned from the good and the bad of Texas and moved on.

On Friday, Lock came through FAU for some offseason quarterback training. Lock lives in Palm Beach and reached out to FAU for a place to throw. He and Herman found each other and took a photo with their thumbs and pinkies out, the same celebration Lock did against Texas and the mocking response Herman later gave.

“The beef has been squashed!” Lock wrote in a tweet.

New beginnings for everyone.