Tom Herman had it easy

Compared to Doc Holliday. Fired the year you were named Conference Coach of the Year,

That’s hard cheese. He will find another gig.

Yes he will, he is a very good coach.

That is almost as dumb as firing Yeoman. Almost.

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85-54 overall and 55-30 in CUSA. Over the last three years his conference record was 16-5. That seems like a raw deal.

It’s a tough business and you can’t blame these guys for jumping ship for more money.

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That’s my takeaway from stuff like this too. No one is safe in the long term.

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we had no choice in that matter. We were told by the NCAA (UT) to fire him or we would never be off probation. We immediately hired him as Alumni outreach and fund raising.

I’m pretty sure that had he been here at UH with that record, there would be many of our current posters calling for his head; after all, he didn’t go to an NY6 bowl and never sniffed the CFP.

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Holliday makes $755,000 a year. Holgorsen makes $3.8M a year. If Holgorsen were making $755,000 a year, I (nor probably anyone else) wouldn’t say a word about not making the NY6 or CFP or about his performance thus far.

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With that logic, we should have kept Levine, he was a bargain. I wonder what he could have done with a $2.5MM budget to hire assistants.

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I agree. We should have. I am on record saying we shouldn’t have fired him.

Edit: Let me put it this way, I would happily sacrifice the 2015 season if we could still have Tony Levine as coach in 2020, because I believed then, like I do now, that he is a good man, he wanted to be at UH, and I think he was on the cusp of figuring things out.

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I don’t think anyone doubts that Tony is a very good man of high character. I do think he would have done a whole lot better had he been given a more reasonable staff budget. No one can doubt his recruiting ability either, but his downfall was his loyalty to Bush and to O’Korn. Had he turned to Ward earlier, I think we would have won a couple more games in 2014 and he may still be here.

I wonder if his loyalty to O’Korn was partly due to pressure to play him because he was a highly rated player.

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I think he pulled the plug on O’Korn at the right time. He gave the kid a fair chance and then went with Greg. We don’t know what would have happened in 2015, but I don’t think Bush would have survived another year if he would have even been the coordinator in 2015. For all the grief Levine gets about Bush, he rarely gets credit for the Meachum, Gibbs, and Spavital hires.

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Tony’s downfall was that he is a good man, but he’s not a good HC.

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Tony gets grief because he promoted Bush to OC when he fired Nesbitt after one game in 2012, demoted him after the season, and turned around and promoted him again the following season.

He knew exactly who Bush was in December 2013 and promoted him anyway. Rumor was that some in the athletics department thought it was a bad idea too. He hitched his wagon to Bush in 2014 and the wagons wheels fell off in the first game.

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I think you can make a strong argument that Tony got a raw deal and should have gotten another season at least. He also might have figured it out, hired a better offensive coordinator a second time after hiring a bad one a second time, and had us consistently winning 7-9 games a year.

But 2015 was one of the best seasons in school history. Tony probably would have had a good year that season but not 13-1 beat FSU in the Peach Bowl good. I still wouldn’t trade that to have our program consistently winning 8-9 games a year right now under a really good guy who wants to be here, assuming Tony could have done that.

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This is true too. Even with the Google jokes you can cut Tony some slack for blowing it with Nesbitt, especially considering that he did a good job course correcting with Meachum. But blowing it with Bush is a lot worse since Bush had already been working for him.

Similar deal with making a bad hire with Jamie Bryant. That was almost worse than Applewhite with D’Onofrio since Tony had worked with Bryant already and should have been able to evaluate him.

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Tony as Coach caused me to miss my first home game in decades. Life’s too short to sit and watch stupid football.

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I agree given more time Levine would’ve figured things out unfortunately I guess we weren’t at a point and time to wait on it. I remember in interviews of him talking about how he always wanted to have a big and physical team on both sides of the ball. He had a great vision but just couldn’t put together quick enough.

Bush is now coaching HS football and looks like Bryant left football and is working in the feed/seed wholesale business.

If that doesn’t tell you all you need to know…

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I liked Tony but the opening night of TDECU is still unforgivable. Good guy though.

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