Q&A with Ohio State's Tom Herman
January, 13, 2012
By Brian Bennett
How'd you like to be Urban Meyer's offensive coordinator at Ohio State?
That's the question Tom Herman got to answer last month while he was calling plays at Iowa State. Needless to say, Herman jumped at the chance to join the Buckeyes, where he'll also serve as quarterbacks coach and tutor budding young star Braxton Miller. Herman will oversee a much different looking Ohio State offense in 2012, and I recently had a chance to catch up with him before he hit the road for the final recruiting push.
What was your reaction like when Urban Meyer first called you?
Tom Herman: I'm a pretty animated guy, so I don't know if it's fit for print. It was awesome. I'm a guy who was born in Cincinnati and whose entire family except for my mother still lives in Cincinnati -- my grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, you name it. For coach Meyer to think that much of me, a guy who's had success everywhere he's been and obviously now at this university that's one of the top five jobs in the country, well, I'm still on cloud nine right now.
Did you know him at all or study his schemes?
TH: As coaches, we do a lot of idea sharing in the offseason. I had never really had a chance to sit down with him or anyone from his previous staffs and talk specifics. But every offseason I'd study everything from their 2005 season at Utah -- I studied that a ton as a young coordinator -- to obviously their great teams at Florida, too. So although I'd never spoken directly to him or anybody on his staff, we still kind of patterned a lot of things we did after what he had been doing.
Did you tell him that during your interview?
TH: Coach Meyer did a really good job in researching this staff. He knew me from all the way back to my days at Rice three or four years ago. He was watching tape and seeing some of the things we were doing even then and how they kind of matched with his philosophy of offensive football. So I did tell him that; whether he believed it or not, who knows? The proof might have been in the product we put on the field.
How would you describe your offensive philosophy?
TH: I think first and foremost, you've got to be able to run the football to be successful in college football. Some teams have thrown the ball 60 times a game and had success doing that. But I think you've got to be able to run the football to have success. And I think by having the quarterback as a legitimate threat in the run game, you really open up a lot if you're able to do that. Then the passing game becomes a whole another ball of wax in terms of the simplicity of the coverages and maybe fronts that you see. So we want to use the whole field. The field is 120 yards long and 50 yards wide and we want to use every square inch of it and spread people out to create mismatches, whether it be through space or a numbers advantage. That's kind of the base philosophy.
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