Houston Cougars head coach Tom Herman goes off on local radio hosts

University of Houston head football coach Tom Herman made an appearance on SportsRadio 610 in Houston on Wednesday morning to address a report by John Lopez about former Texas A&M quarterback Kyle Allen, who officially transferred to the Cougars this week.

Herman’s appearance on In The Loop with Nick Wright and Lopez immediately turned contentious, and what followed was a bizarre 22 minute confrontation.

The crux of Herman’s screed against Lopez and Wright is that Lopez wrote a story about Herman meeting Allen that Herman felt wasn’t true. Herman’s argument was that because the alleged meeting didn’t take place where Lopez said it did, the entire report was invalid.

Lopez cut off Herman multiple times during the interview, and when Herman was allowed to talk, he took issue with the report and how close Lopez was to the program.

“Nick and John, since I’ve been here, how many practices have you been to in person?”
“None”
“How many times have you had me on your show?”
“Once. Well, twice now”
“How many times have we spoken in person?”
“Once”

That leads to Herman questioning the report because the relative distance between Lopez and the Houston program. He also defined the word “meet”, which led to Wright and Lopez complaining about semantics.

It seems to me that Herman was trying to throw out the baby with the bath water because of one part of Lopez’s report, and he kept circling the wagons on that part of the report.

While the confrontation was clearly entertaining, and the hosts were unprofessional at times, Herman also didn’t come off that well. His “fire” analogy didn’t make much sense, and he kept going back to it.

The whole situation is bizarre. With all due respect to the University of Houston and its fans, Houston is a professional sports town – the Cougars just aren’t all that high up on the food chain. Imagine if this situation was taking place in say, Austin, with numerous beat writers hovering around the program and reporting on every detail and going-on with the football program. Would Herman end up going on the radio to refute every report that wasn’t 100% accurate?

But after a 13 win season, there will likely be a lot more attention paid to the Houston Cougars going forward, so Herman is going to need to pick his battles. He can’t take issue with every report going forward and torch every writer…or can he?