Charlie Strong officially out as University of Texas head football coach.
16-21 in three seasons: 6-7 in 2014, 5-7 in 2015, and 5-7 again this year.
Strong ran his program by his personal moral compass whereby players could lose their scholarship by violating one of his five core values, which included being honest and not using drugs. He kicked 10 players off the team that first year and doubled the amount of drug testing that went on under Brown.
Strong won universal praise from UT administrators and parents. That’s a primary reason how he captured consecutive top-10 recruiting classes the last two years. Dozens of recruits’ parents told the American-Statesman they wanted their sons to play for a man of Strong’s character.
That’s pretty much the saddest thing about this: it seems like he is a great guy, and everybody liked him. But his teams just were not performing on the field, and (this is also sad to say) there’s just too much invested in UT football to have three consecutive losing seasons.
The mildly amusing aspect of this is that UT has supposedly already hired Tom Herman, current University of Houston head coach and former Ohio State offensive coordinator. (Hello, my northern relatives who are currently watching the Ohio State game!) This is mildly amusing because earlier in the week ESPN was reporting that UT boosters were pushing hard for Herman. By the middle of the week, the reports were that LSU was going to hire Herman. By yesterday, the reports were that LSU wasn’t going to wait around on Herman and had made their interim coach (Ed Orgeron) the non-interim coach instead.
So almost everybody got more or less what they wanted: UT boosters got Herman, LSU got somebody who is at least familiar with the program, Herman gets a larger paycheck, more prestige, and less family disruption. And Charlie Strong gets a contract buyout (“Strong has two years remaining on a guaranteed contract worth $10.7 million.”)