As usual, Tom Herman knew better than the rest of us.

He always has. From the month he stepped on campus as head coach at Texas, it became plainly obvious there was no reason to question the credentials of anyone he chose to hire or the caliber of anyone he chose to play, because most of us simple-minded folk cannot even dream of comprehending all of the subtle intricacies that go into such decisions.

And so it should have come as no surprise that the ignorant, unsophisticated football-watching public completely misconstrued what happened to Herman's Longhorns in their season-opening loss to Maryland on Saturday, when what appeared to be the latest in a long line of UT humiliations was actually nothing of the sort.

Silly us. We are so naïve, so painfully uninformed, that we thought we were watching a team as unprepared to start Herman's second season as it was to start its first. Dummies that we are, we assumed that a flurry of bone-headed penalties and a rash of late-game turnovers were signs of a squad that remains as sloppy and as undisciplined as ever, but the truth is we just did not understand how much the Longhorns had improved.

Thankfully, Herman was gracious enough to break it down for the reporters covering the game in Landover, Maryland, and thereby set a country full of mouth-breathing college football watchers straight.

Sure, it might have seemed like the Longhorns made all the same mistakes they did last year, and that the offense showed no signs of progress from a season in which it ranked as one of the worst in the Big 12, but that's only because we did not notice any of the details Herman and his staff did.

"We saw a lot of development," Herman said. "I wouldn't say we failed in that area."

And although we know-nothings might have assumed it might be a unnerving to lose a second consecutive opener to a moribund program that had spent the last month mired in a scandal, and was playing for an interim head coach, and had not beaten any ranked team aside from UT in 22 tries dating to 2011, it's actually no big deal.

After all, when Herman was asked by some knee-jerk journalist to describe how big a setback the defeat was for a program that wants so desperately to be taken seriously again that it made "Prove Us Right" the team motto, he answered, "Not very."

After all, can't the world see how right the wise John Mackovic was when he referred to such temporary embarrassments as "a blip on the radar screen?"

The general public just has no perspective. Fans watch a team suffer a loss like Saturday's, which flukishly included a bunch of the symptoms of six losses last fall, and they trick themselves into seeing the continuation of a trend.

That nonsense makes Herman shake his head.

"A lot of people are going to want to say this feels a lot like last year," Herman said. "It doesn't to me."

What the rest of us need to realize is that Vince Lombardi was wrong. Winning isn't the only thing. And Bill Parcells misspoke when he said a team is what its record says it is.

Sometimes, all that matters is how good the team thinks it is. And the outside world just needs to trust the coach on that.

"We know how much better we are now than we were probably at any point last year," Herman said. "We didn't show it in the first quarter and the fourth quarter."

Minor details, those. Second-guessing anything that happens during pivotal moments in the game — which quarterback Herman uses, which plays the team runs, etc. — is pointless, just as it was to second-guess the decisions Herman made way back when he was just starting at UT.

Some of us remember the reception he got when he hired Tim Beck as offensive coordinator, despite a bit of a lackluster track record, and when he hired Casey Horny as a quality control assistant, despite his longtime association with a Baylor staff apparently unaware of what was happening in its own program.

Herman's message back then was clear. He knew better than the rest of us.

And clearly, he still does. He surely realizes that UT fans never should have expected a national contender to come anytime soon, anyway. After all, over the past 34 years, the Longhorns have finished as many seasons unranked as they have in the Top 25.

That decade-long streak of success to start the Mack Brown era? That was the outlier, not the norm.

Despite what many Longhorns continue to believe, winning football games is not their birthright. They need to realize all of this is far more complicated than it looks.

And they need to admit that when it comes to believing their own eyes or the guy who knows better, well, the choice is obvious.

Mike Finger is a columnist with the San Antonio Express-News.