The Texas 20, No. 14: New coaches at SMU and Houston

[caption id="attachment_17841" align="alignleft" width="300"]UH coach Tom Herman (top) and SMU coach Chad Morris. UH coach Tom Herman (top) and SMU coach Chad Morris.[/caption] This is the Texas 20, DCTF’s countdown of the 20 biggest storylines heading into the 2015 football season.No. 20: Is there a college sleeper in Texas?No. 19: Which Texas high school football records will be broken? No. 18: State title games headed to Houston No. 17: Will anyone play defense this season? No. 16: Can Allen keep dominating without Kyler Murray? No. 15: Cameron Yoe's chase for a fourth straight titleToday, we’ve reached No. 14: New coaches at SMU and Houston. New coaches at Texas colleges have become, for the most part, an annual tradition. The 2015 season will be the sixth consecutive year that the Lone Star State will have at least one new head coach. But this season’s new coaching crop has a distinctly different feel. Though both are taking their first collegiate head coaching job, they’re inheriting programs that really couldn’t be more dissimilar, despite sharing a conference. For Chad Morris at SMU, it’s a complete rebuild, picking up the pieces from the disastrous end to the largely successful June Jones era and putting the Ponies back together. The former Texas high school football coach (where he won titles at Lake Travis) and Clemson offensive coordinator has already made it clear that football is coming back on the Hilltop — his initial recruiting class was a star-studded one, and the attitude around the program is already on the rise. It’s positivity, positivity, positivity at SMU. It’s totally different for Tom Herman at Houston. Coming off a national championship as the offensive coordinator for Ohio State, Herman takes over a program whose most recent few seasons — from the end of the Kevin Sumlin regime through the Tony Levine era — can be described as “solid, not spectacular.” Herman’s job is clear: get the Coogs out of the “pretty good” tier and into the “elite” one. Sometimes, he’s been a bit abrasive in his means (example: this weekend’s quote about his wide receiver depth), but that’s likely because he knows UH isn’t a rebuilding project like SMU; it’s a resurgence project. Expectations are obviously wildly different for these two teams. For Morris at SMU, the goal is getting back to respectability; that will likely take some time, and 2015 may be when the Ponies take their lumps. But it’s a short-term pain for a long-term gain. For Herman at Houston? It’s time to contend for a conference championship, and they’ve got eh weapons to do it. How will the two new guys on the block in the Lone Star State fare? It’s one of the biggest questions in the state heading into 2015.