University of Houston football coach Tom Herman will not continue this season his weekly appearances on KILT (610 AM), a school spokesman and the station said Wednesday.
Herman, who had a public disagreement with some of the station’s current and former hosts about a recruiting topic last year, will appear at 8:30 a.m. Thursdays on KBME (790 AM), which broadcasts UH games.
ALSO SEE: UH coach Tom Herman blasts local radio hosts in interview
Ryan McCredden, KILT’s program director, said the station will have occasional appearances from college football coaches this year but has no regularly scheduled appearances planned.
Apparently, the final straw for Herman was an article on KILT’s website last week with the headline “Tom Herman Should Leave UH for These 9 Programs.” The author of the article then tagged Herman in a tweet promoting it.
In a segment on KILT’s afternoon drive-time show “The Triple Threat” on Monday, hosts Sean Pendergast, Rich Lord and Ted Johnson addressed Herman cutting off the station.
“My opinion on this – I do think it’s short-sighted,” Pendergast said. “This is a show that has numerically speaking, our show, has the biggest audience in town and has for a long, long time. It seems peculiar that you wouldn’t want to do an interview.
“If Coach Herman were to leave someday to go somewhere else, there are places where the spotlight burns a whole lot brighter than the University of Houston. Things like articles on the 610 Sports Radio website are going to seem minuscule. They’re going to be a pimple compared to starting out 4-5 in a given season at Texas, Texas A&M or some other school.
“His us-against-the-world mentality is a) perfect for that school because I think they have that mentality and b) it’s perfect for that school right now.”
Johnson, a former standout linebacker at Colorado and with the New England Patriots, called Herman’s decision “overreacting big time” and a “college football mentality” to try to control the media.
“For college coaches to do that, they can do that in those small little towns in Happy Valley (Pa.) and those kinds of places,” Johnson said. “For him to have this as a straw that broke the camel’s back is a huge overreaction on his part.”
Pendergast, in response to feedback from UH fans, said “our audience did not increase when Coach Herman was on.”
“It didn’t decrease (or) crater or anything like that,” Pendergast said. “We got the same audience talking about the Texans’ fifth-string running backs as we did talking with Coach Herman. So from our standpoint, Coach Herman gets the same audience as us talking about (Texans backups) Alfred Blue or Kenny Hilliard. Let’s not act like ‘No soup for you, 610.'”
Herman and KILT have had a couple other incidents in the past year.
Last November, an article on the KILT website by former on-air host Brien Straw said Herman was leaving UH for Georgia, citing a dubious tweet that was quickly discredited. The article’s headline initially said “One-And-Done for Herman at UH.” The link to that article now redirects to KILT’s main sports page (but a Facebook post promoting it is still up, with a revision to the original headline).
Then in January, Herman engaged in a contentious interview with KILT’s former morning duo of Nick Wright and John Lopez. That came after Lopez reported that Herman met with quarterback Kyle Allen in person about transferring to UH from Texas A&M.
Herman sent out a statement through UH blasting Lopez’s report and the following day, the coach sparred on-air with Wright and Lopez in a memorable interview that ran 20-plus minutes.
It included Herman at one point reading the definition of the word “meet” and concluded with him saying “absolutely not – nope” to Wright’s invitation to lunch.
