Tom Herman on Urban Meyer to Texas Rumors: 'It's Almost Comical at Times'

Addressing rumors that he may be replaced with former Florida and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer after this season, Texas head coach Tom Herman said he has bigger concerns.

In his regularly scheduled press conference ahead of the 5-2 Longhorns' matchup with 0-7 Kansas this weekend, Herman said (via  Jeff Howe of 247 Sports) he's "not at all" worried about his job or how rumors about his future are impacting his players and recruits: 

"I'm concerned about our players, I'm concerned about this program, I'm concerned about beating Kansas, I'm concerned about all of our goals still being in front of us. But to directly answer your question, I do think with the players it's really easy. These guys, they've seen it all, done at all. It's almost comical at times to them because they know the truth."

Herman said it's easy to discredit the rumors within the program, but he believes that other programs use the stories to their advantage in trying to lure recruits away from the Longhorns: 

"If I'm a competing recruiter, what do you do? You press 'print' and you say, 'Look, this is true! It must be true! It's on OrangeFans.com? It must be true! Or it was written by this guy, so it must be true! Or this source said this, so it must be true! That is really, really the hard part in recruiting is because these 16-year-old kids are very impressionable. Unfortunately, when negativity gets written — especially unfounded, rumor-based, unnamed source-based negativity gets written — then it makes our competing recruiter's jobs just so much more easy. They just press 'print' and say, 'Here you go.'"

The Longhorns suffered a major recruiting loss in October when they lost the commitment of Quinn Ewers, the top-rated quarterback recruit in the Class of 2022.

"The more I’ve considered, the more I’ve come to realize I didn’t explore all options as thoroughly as I would have liked," Ewers wrote. "Therefore, I’ve decided to de-commit and reassess the situation before making such an important decision for my future."

Texas was slotted to finish third in the Big 12 in the conference's preseason poll, with four first place votes, but the Longhorns are slotted fifth and ranked No. 22 in the AP Top 25 poll. They haven't won the Big 12 title game since 2009, when they went 13-1 under Mack Brown. Herman is 30-17 through four seasons at Texas, with his lone 10-win season coming in 2018. 

But before Herman can worry about his job, he's focused on leading the Longhorns to their fourth-straight win on Sunday against Kansas.