Who is Charlie Strong? An inside look at Texas' new coach

[Harry]

Charlie Strong opens his eyes. It’s 4 a.m. He rises, dresses and, without caffeine, drives 20 minutes to the Texas football facility. On Mondays he runs south to downtown via Red River Street and returns on Guadalupe Street. On Tuesdays he heads through neighborhoods to the north. The routes vary each day, but the goal remains the same -- shave a few seconds off his time from the week before.

He does not always succeed, but Strong still bangs out five miles at a nine-minute clip, straining to outrace some previous version of himself. He has done this for his entire career, through 14 coaching jobs at eight universities -- three decades spent pushing himself forward while running in loops. And yet even when he has reached his destination, Strong cannot help but do what he has always done, so he runs just as hard.

Last winter, after going 23-3 during his final two seasons at Louisville, Strong landed what many consider the best coaching gig in the country, signing a five-year, $26 million deal at Texas. If everything is big in Texas, the task of reviving the football team is no exception. The Longhorns went 18-17 in the Big 12 under Mack Brown over the last four seasons; this year they didn’t have a player drafted by the NFL for the first time since 1937. And Strong’s hiring as the program’s first black coach carries with it a social significance that matches the breadth of his improbable journey. “Could you ever believe,” Strong confided to a friend recently, “that I ended up at Texas?”

Sitting at a conference room table the size of a par-3 that’s adjacent to his office, the 53-year-old Strong has little interest in taking inventory of the hardships he’s endured or in dwelling on the issues of race that have dogged his past and bring significance to his present. Of his humble beginnings he says simply, “We came from nothing, but we still had enough. Everybody supported one another.” About the whispers that bias popped up every time he got passed over for a head coaching job:

“I didn’t get hired because they didn’t feel like I was [the best] candidate for their position, but I think everybody wanted to make it about race.”

Read more: http://www.si.com/college-football/2014/07/22/charlie-strong-texas-longhorns