Texas Football: Zach Smith jabs at Tom Herman after firing

Now former Texas football head coach Tom Herman had his firing draw a lot of different polarized reviews on social media this weekend.

On the morning of Jan. 2, the shocking news hit the public spotlight that the Texas football program would be replacing now former fourth-year head coach Tom Herman with the current Alabama Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian. The Broyles Award winner Sarkisian was a pretty surprising hire for Texas athletic director Chris del Conte given the pursuit of the former Florida Gators and Ohio State Buckeyes three-time National Championship winning head coach Urban Meyer a few months back.

And there were tons of reactions that dropped from around the college football landscape pertaining to this Herman and Sark news during the weekend. One of the more notable reactions around the media landscape came from a former fellow assistant coach under Meyer’s staff in Columbus of Herman’s, Zach Smith.

Once the news hit the public eye on the morning of Jan. 2, Smith took to his Twitter timeline to make his voice heard on the subject. He was active on social media all day long, a lot of it pertaining to various reactions to the Longhorns news cycle on the coaching carousel.

Smith didn’t seem too friendly with Herman from all the tension around the media landscape in the last few years. It was largely considered a distraction for the Longhorns, but Herman never really addressed those matters.

There’s no surprise that someone like Smith took to social media to have his voice heard on the matter. But this reaction from Smith does signify something bigger concerning the Herman news. The polarized reactions to the coaching change on the Forty Acres shows just how divided the program, and the people around it, were on what to do with Herman.

And there’s still a lot of divide as to how Longhorns feel about the replacing of Herman with Sark. There’s a lot of people that feel like there were better candidates out there, and some others that believe that change (no matter what) was necessary during the 2021 offseason.

Texas finished up the 2020 season under Herman’s direction with a record of 7-3 (5-3 Big 12), following their dominant Alamo Bowl win over the Colorado Buffaloes on the night of Dec. 29. They won five of their last six games during the 2020 campaign.