Texas Football: How Tom Herman wants to shift targeting rules

Recent thoughts from Texas football head coach Tom Herman shows that he’s clearly not fine with the current standing of the targeting rules.

When it was instituted less than 15 years ago into the game of football, the targeting rules were very controversial at the outset. A lot of calls that football fans felt were soft or uncalled for at the time were ultimately meant for player health. Even to this day, targeting calls still carry plenty of controversy. And this rings pretty true with head coach Tom Herman and the Texas football program.

Recently in an interview with Horns247, the head coach of the Texas Longhorns football program Herman opened up on how he felt any controversial targeting calls, and the rules themselves, needed to be adjusted in the near future.

Here’s what he had to say on the matter.

"“As physical of football as we pride ourselves in playing, and we always will, I’ve said it before: Nobody’s ever won a championship in this great sport at any level — whether it be pee wee football to junior high to high school to college to the pros — and the head coach was asked, ‘Coach, how did you win this game?’ And the answer was, ‘Well, we out-finessed everybody,’” Herman said. “That’s never happened. When it does, you’ll see my keys on my desk and Michelle and I will be in Key West or California somewhere because I’m out.“This is a physical, physical game,” he continued. “We legislate intent on so many things in so many different sports. It’s a reason there’s a yellow card and a red card (in soccer). There’s a reason why there’s a flagrant 1 and a flagrant 2 in basketball. I don’t know why we can’t have a targeting [penalty where it’s], ‘Yeah, he hit the guy in the targeting zone, but he didn’t mean to.’”"

This article points out the pure fact of how many players the Longhorns have lost in the last couple of years to various targeting calls. Now part of that has to be responsibility that the players and coaching staff has to be more focused on with discipline.

But it still had a huge impact when the Longhorns had to play various games without the likes of safety/nickelback B.J. Foster, linebacker Gary Johnson, and cornerback Anthony Cook, among others, in the last two years. Given how much injury trouble Texas went through last season, they have to figure out how to stay more focused on keeping their top defenders on the field come this fall.

The take that Herman has here is essentially that the refs should have more discretion in giving players second chances when this call first happens. He refers to how refs handle these calls in basketball, and how you have at least a couple of chances before getting ejected.

There were some alterations to the targeting rules from the NCAA this offseason, namely that any ejected player would be allowed to stay on the sideline. This could be a first step in the direction of the rules that Herman wants for targeting calls.