NCAAF teams
Travis Haney, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

How Tom Herman, Chad Morris are building Houston, SMU

College Football, SMU Mustangs, Houston Cougars

There's no blueprint for this. There's no specific, detailed set of instructions on how to run a college football program, especially when it's your first time.

That's not to say that new head coaches, Houston's Tom Herman and SMU's Chad Morris among them, do not come armed with a plan. Those plans differ, naturally, because each school, program and situation is different, unique in its own positives and drawbacks.

Herman and Morris have plenty of similarities: previously successful Power 5 offensive coordinators; coaching backgrounds in Texas; beginning their college head-coaching careers at American Athletic schools in two of the largest cities in recruit-rich Texas. And yet SMU and Houston are different jobs, which means Herman and Morris have attacked their first few months in divergent ways.


HOUSTON -- Herman's initial focus centered on player culture. He arrived in mid-January, following Ohio State's national title run, to learn that his newly inherited players were too often showing up late for meetings and workouts, missing too many classes.

The players who arrived to the team's facility on Sunday, Feb. 1 found a message from the new coach: The doors were padlocked. The Houston Cougars had literally been locked out of their locker room.

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