Texas Football: Joel Klatt torches Tom Herman’s recruiting job with Horns
The results on the recruiting trail and on the field for the last 18 months are not where they should be for Texas football head coach Tom Herman.
On a recent appearance on Colin Cowherd’s talk show “The Herd” earlier this week, Fox Sports college football media personality and former Colorado Buffaloes quarterback Joel Klatt opened up on some aspects of the Texas football program. Klatt specifically talked on the matter of how fourth-year Texas head coach Tom Herman is letting all of the in-state talent slip out of Texas on the recruiting trail.
This is something that is a looming problem for the Longhorns for a good while now. The looming problem for the Longhorns on the recruiting trail was something that existed before Herman’s tenure, though. This was just his issue to fix, and he really hasn’t.
The rival Texas A&M Aggies also brought on the former Florida State Seminoles head coach Jimbo Fisher on one of the most massive and expensive long-term contracts in the entire country. While Texas A&M is doing better on the recruiting trail as a whole under Fisher than they did under former head coach Kevin Sumlin, they are also still letting top tier high school talent slip out of the state.
All of the blue blood programs in surrounding states cherry picking talent on the recruiting trail out of the Longhorns and Aggies grasp is what brings this conversation that Cowherd and Klatt were having this week to the forefront. Texas’ results are slipping on the recruiting trail for the 2021 and 2022 cycles.
Klatt specifically did put Herman on blast for both addressing the Urban Meyer coaching rumors this week and the slipping results on the recruiting trail. He mentioned how former Texas head coach Mack Brown never really let in-state talent slip out during his tenure on the Forty Acres. But now Herman and even former Texas head coach Charlie Strong saw this trend emerge in a big way for the Longhorns.
According to the 247Sports Team Composite Rankings, the 2021 Texas recruiting class ranks at No. 17 in the nation and remains in the second spot in the Big 12 behind the Oklahoma Sooners. Despite landing two blue chip commits in the last five days, Herman couldn’t move the needle for the 2021 cycle in the national class rankings.
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This conversation of how detrimental it is to the future of the Longhorns football program in letting in-state talent walk is personified by the Quinn Ewers situation. Texas let the nation’s top ranked 2022 high school quarterback prospect out of their grasp, and thus it looks like he could be taking his talents to join head coach Ryan Day and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Ewers is a product of Southlake-Carroll High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.