The workouts started at 4:30 a.m.

In Tom Herman’s first spring as a head coach, Houston’s players circled the field five times for a warmup. When the whistle blew, they did it again. Then came the stretching, which was quickly followed by an hour to two hours of pain.

Herman told his team it would be the “hardest offseason in the history of college football.”

He meant it.

“It felt like it was,” former Houston safety Trevon Stewart told 247Sports. “It’s like military workouts. It’s crazy.”

The Cougars felt their coach and his staff of energetic football demons were a little psychotic. ‘This dude is crazy,’ former Houston defensive back Adrian McDonald, now with the San Diego Chargers, remembers thinking that spring.

That’s what the Texas Longhorns are getting in Herman. He’s a 41-year-old going from a graduate assistant role with Texas to the head coach’s office in less than 20 years. He’s traced an unparalleled route back to Austin that includes just two seasons as a head coach and a new contract which will pay him over $5 million a year.

If you’re wondering how he got here so quickly, his former players at Houston quite emphatically point to those workouts and the dedication Herman demands from his team. Herman made it quite clear that process would continue at Texas during his introductory press conference Sunday.

“I told them this program is going to be really hard,” Herman said. “Winning is hard. They don't give and hand out championship trophies.”

The Cougars took them under Herman – AAC and Peach Bowl memorabilia, to be exact – and the culture he created is the source of that success.

Well that and more than just a bit of suffering.

“I’ve never been around anything like (the practices) before,” McDonald said. “He just got it out of us. He just got the best out of us every day.”

***

“You ever see Coach Carter?”

Stewart asks this before detailing the first few months of the Herman era at Houston, where the first-year head coach’s tactics mirrored that of Samuel L. Jackson in the 2005 film, which was based on real events.

Memorably, Jackson’s character chained up the doors to the gym until his team earned the right to practice there. Herman did the same thing to Houston’s locker room doors.

“You have to earn the right to get into the locker room,” Herman told them.

He also took away his team’s UofH gear, telling them they had to secure their right to wear the logo. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Texas’ previous head coach, Charlie Strong, did the same thing with the Longhorn symbol. Perhaps it’s a product of both coaches branching off the Urban Meyer coaching tree. But Herman got it to work at Houston with a 22-4 overall record compared to Strong's 16-21 mark at Texas.

How did Herman transform his team? Intense competition in muggy Houston heat, and more than a few breakfasts gone bad.

One of Herman’s many mantras at Houston was “train for chaos.” That meant many things to the Cougar players, but mostly practices would be intense slogs. The NCAA allows 12 live contact practices in the preseason, two a week during the season and eight during spring practice – Herman used every second of all of them.

Houston had a full contact practice every Tuesday of the 2015 season in which the Cougars went 13-1 and beat Florida State in the Peach Bowl. That meant pads, it meant contact and it meant plenty of those distinct pops that accompany football equipment colliding.

Herman wanted practices to hurt.

He wanted the game to feel less intense than a normal Tuesday afternoon.

“On a scale of 1-10 I’d say practice is a 10 every day and the game itself is a seven,” Houston defensive back Howard Wilson told 247Sports in November.

It worked for the Cougars. Not only did Houston finish 22-4 in Herman’s tenure, it suffocated opponents late. Houston outscored opponents by an average of 18.8-9.7 in the second half during Herman’s two years on campus. In games that were decided by two scores or less, the Cougars scored 157 fourth-quarter points against 100 for their opponents.

“We train to go long,” Stewart said. “We train to keep going. You can see the difference in the game.”

The results came eventually, sure. But Herman had to motivate his team to buy into the culture he wanted to create in the first place. To do so, he prioritized competition. Everything the Cougars did in practice had an adversarial aspect – sprints, drills even the speed with which they moved to stations.

Those results were tallied, usually by offense vs. defense, and winners and losers were declared.

You didn’t want to be a loser.

When those 4:30 a.m. practices ended, the Cougars would head to breakfast as a team. Winners were rewarded with a buffet of appetizing options. An omelet bar, chicken and waffles or a giant trey of fruit, they could have it all.

The losers ate last, and the menu changed. They were handed a spoon to feast on watered down eggs and half-burnt biscuits. Herman wanted losing to hurt, so he instructed that biscuits be left in the oven a few minutes too long and water to be poured over the eggs.

“You just wish you won that day,” McDonald said.

“A lot of coaches don’t do the same thing Herman and his staff did,” Stewart added.

This intensity can take its toll. Injures tend to accrue the more hits a player takes, and in Houston’s losses to Navy and SMU this season it missed an average of five starters a contest. In its other loss, against Memphis, the question of Herman’s future hung over the program.

Following Houston’s victory over No. 5 Louisville on Nov. 17, Herman stated: “We have not gone anywhere. We were banged up, tired and exhausted in the month of October. That's not an excuse, that's reality.”

At Houston those injuries at the top of the depth chart were crippling. At Texas, where the Longhorns recruit four- and five-star players from 1-85 on the roster, Stewart believes Herman’s physical practices will be all the more effective.

“There’s a lot of high-caliber guys there, more depth,” Stewart said. “I feel like he might even turn it up a little extra.”

***

There were two parts to Coach Carter, however. While he may have come across as a disciplinary tyrant in the beginning, Carter also balanced that with touches of humanity in his relations with his players.

Herman is the same way, and a lot of that traces back to the honestly with which he treats his team – both Stewart and McDonald understood his move to jump to Texas and didn’t feel like he mislead the Cougars.

His first day in Houston, Herman told his team: “I’m not going to treat everybody the same.”

Treating everyone equally is a well-trodden banality in sports, not to mention life, and the players know it's nonsensical. When Herman came in, he told the Cougars that if they didn’t do what they should in practice, off the field and in the classroom, he wouldn’t treat them with respect.

Stewart said Herman would walk past players in the hall without even a nod if they failed in any of those areas. If the player performed in all three aspects, Herman would have a hug for him and a question about his family.

“That’s a big difference with a lot of coaches,” Stewart said.

Herman takes a “demand, don’t ask” approach to instruction, and at Houston his players responded to that. His success is certainly tied to the roster he inherited – his first team started 16 upperclassmen for the Peach Bowl – but Stewart said culture superseded all, including scheme.

After all, those same players finished 7-5 the year before under Tony Levine.

“I feel like Herman walked into the perfect position,” Stewart said. “But we had those players under Levine and couldn’t do what he did. He taught us a different way. He didn’t take no bullshit from nobody. But outside of football it’s all love.

“Everybody gravitated toward him.”

Herman is fond of saying “culture wins games,” and he’ll have an opportunity to prove it in Austin. Much like he did at Houston, Herman will inherit a talented roster with experience bolstered by back-to-back Top 10 recruiting classes under Strong.

As he did with the Cougars, he’ll have to alter the culture to the point where winning becomes the expectation again in Austin.

“Some of the things that we'll do in our program will be similar,” Herman said Sunday. “But I also told (the team) that the definition of insanity is repeatedly performing the same act, expecting different results, and that we need to change some things.”

Part of that alteration will be to meld the Longhorns together. Herman used a technique at Houston that Stewart credits for much of the team’s success. He assigned each Cougar both a “little” and “big brother,” and handed each pair a set of questions such as: What does trust mean to you? Who was the most influential person in your life? What’s the worst thing you’ve been through?

Heavy stuff, and Herman encouraged his players to be as open as possible. Some players spoke of death, others of parents on drugs.

“When you know what happened to the man beside you, you’ll play even harder for him,” Stewart said.

Herman, a man of many faces, doesn’t hesitate to show his affection. Herman is well known for kissing his players on the cheek before games, but these smooches aren’t just reserved for pregame.

The top players in Houston under Herman were known as “his dudes.” Dudes were the ballers, the best players on the team. That position came with playing time and Herman’s love. Houston’s players balked at it initially, but they grew to appreciate the pecks on the cheek.

“It’s just like the Godfather, you know?” Stewart said.

Perhaps Herman is just a mashup of movie montages and motivational techniques. Either way, the one-time $5,000-a-year graduate assistant is Texas’ new head man tasked with turning around a program that’s 46-42 since the turn of the decade.

Those 4:30 a.m. workouts are coming soon for the Longhorns, and Houston’s former players are confident they’ll work wonders at Texas. The Longhorns just need to survive first.

“He called it fight or flight,” McDonald said. “Some people left and some people stayed. Those people who stayed were rewarded at the end. It’s just a matter of those kids buying into his plan.”