Once a power conference team (Southwestern Conference), the Houston Cougars are back in big-time college football after a quarter-century absence.
Unless you’re a Cougar fan, getting your arms around Houston football takes time. It’s an up-and-down story of building a program, searching for a conference home after being displaced, and building again.
The good news is that stability may finally be here for a team that just a few years ago was denied admission to the conference it now (as of July 1) calls home–the Big 12. Years earlier (1996), the Big 12 also said no. The third time is the charm.
Like fellow member UCF, the University of Houston is a relatively young institution, founded in the late 1920s as a junior college. By the mid-1930s, the school transitioned to four-year status and became a public institution in the late 1960s. Today, UH is a large (47,000 students) research university in a state known internationally for high-quality higher education (e.g., University of Texas at Austin, Rice University).
For UH, football wasn’t in the picture until after WW II, with 1949 being the first season of play. It was a hodge-podge schedule, just as you would expect for a newcomer: North Texas, St. Bonaventure, and William & Mary were on the slate in a season that ended with a 5-4 record. Beginning play as an independent, it didn’t take UH long to join a conference. It was the Missouri Valley Conference back then, but that affiliation lasted only through the ’50s before the Cougars returned to independent status.
The year was 1960, and Houston transitioned to a big-time football schedule, playing the likes of Texas A&M (TAMU), Florida State, and Mississippi State. But perhaps more than the schedule, history will show that the headline news back then was the head coach. In 1962, Bill Yeoman came to Houston from East Lansing, Michigan, where he was an assistant under Duffy Daugherty and the Michigan State Spartans. Yeoman remained as the Cougars’ head coach until 1986 and won 160 games. He’s now enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Yeoman’s statue located outside of the UH stadium (photo, Wikipedia Commons)
Yeoman’s name is known nationally, not just because he was a long-serving head coach, but mainly for his innovative style. He created what became known as “The Houston Veer,” better known today as The Triple Option or Flexbone. This “great equalizer” enables teams with limited size to compete on equal footing, and it’s still used today by teams like the Navy and (until recently) Georgia Tech. Running it requires a running QB, serviceable running backs, and a good O-line. Defenses must be prepared to defend not one but three options on every offensive play.
Yeoman’s leadership and stability continued in the 1970s when UH got its first big break, admission to the Southwest Conference, a major football-playing conference back then. It was a league with Texas-based membership save for the Arkansas Razorbacks. SWC was quite the thing in those days, too, highlighted nationally each year as millions of fans watched Texas and Texas A&M battle on TV over Thanksgiving Weekend.
Then the bottom fell out. Arkansas left the SWC for the Southeastern Conference in 1991, and the SWC disbanded in 1996, with a tale of two cities ending. The Big 8 expanded to the Big 12 by adding Baylor, Texas Tech, Texas, and TAMU. Other former SWC schools–Rice, SMU, TCU, and Houston–were left out in the cold, and each school had to find a new conference affiliation. Rice, SMU, and TCU left for the Western Athletic Conference (WAC). On the other hand, Houston joined a newly established conference, Conference USA, which was formed by merging two former conferences, including the basketball-playing Metro Conference. The new league included football-playing Southern Miss, Memphis, Tulane, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Houston. Within a few years, the other former SWC teams that had joined the WAC also migrated to C-USA.
After Yeoman departed, Houston football went through a number of ups-and-down years, with several good years coming under the leadership of nationally-recognized head coaches, including Jack Pardee, Art Briles, Kevin Sumlin, and Tom Herman. Herman’s tenure, although short (only two seasons before he left for Texas), was outstanding, with a 22-4 overall record. Later (in 2019), Dana Holgorsen arrived from Morgantown, WV, to take over as head coach, a position he holds today. Holgorsen went to Houston with fanfare but has had modest success since arriving, going 27-20 overall and 18-12 in the American Conference. Meanwhile, things didn’t turn out for Herman in Austin, and he is currently the head man of the Florida Atlantic Owls.
The football Cougars went 8-5 last year, losing along the way to two Big 12 teams, Texas Tech and Kansas. UH had little trouble scoring (36-point average a game, and 320 passing yards a game, 8th nationally), but the difference-maker was defense. UH gave up (on average) 420 yards a game, yielding 48 points to KU and a whopping 77 points to SMU.
Pressure is on Holgorsen to shore up the D, and he has an experienced crew to get the job done (eight juniors and seniors). The key will be the pass rush, and OU transfer David Ugwoebu is expected to fill in for Derek Parish and D’Anthony Jones, who have departed. On offense, the Cougars lost a key skill player in RB Alton McCaskell, who transferred to Colorado, and they will have a new QB under center, Donovan Smith, a transfer from Texas Tech, who will throw to veterans Matthew Golden and Samuel Brown, among others. On special teams, punting is solid (Laine Wilkins, 44-yard average), but placekicking seems shaky. Jack Martin (transfer from Troy) has only one career FG attempt, from 29 yards, which he made.
Photo courtesy Texas Monthly
Off-the-field, entry into the Big 12 is expected to regenerate fan energy for football. It’s no secret that Houston football hasn’t been a hot ticket, which is amazing in the football-mad state of Texas. Last year, 24,000 was the median attendance for the six home games played in the 40,000-seat TDECU Stadium. The KU game drew the biggest crowd of 30,000.
This year, Holgorsen’s previous link to WVU should add spice to the Thursday night home game on October 12 against the Mountaineers. Moreover, four Mountaineers transferred to Houston since the end of the 2022 season–RB Tony Mathis Jr., WR Sam Brown, TE Mike O’Laughlin, and DB Noah Guzman. Lot’s a spice, right? But it’s not hot, at least not yet, as $40 will get you two upper-level seats via VividSeats as of July 17. You’d need to pay at least five times as much ($208 minimum for two tickets) to attend the following week’s UH-Texas game in Austin.
On the bright side, Houston has a good chance of hitting the ground running against Power 5 competition. That’s because the Cougars have plenty of experience playing teams from the ACC (40-28-4 overall record), SEC (43-79-4), Big 10 (7-8), PAC-12 (17-25), and Big 12 (62-73-5).
Still, I expect a settling-in period for a program that “has been there before” but will likely need time to settle into the big time again.
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NOTE: Text is drawn from comments made on Wolfman’s Call with Host Dale Wolfley (July 17, 2023) on the West Virginia Football channel at the Voice of College Football network and on Facebook at Dale Wolfley’s public figure page.
SOURCES: Besides the text stations in hypertext, this article draws on material published in Sports Reference, College Football, Houston, TCU, Rice, and SMU; Winsipedia.com; Lindy’s College Football, National 2023 Preview; and publically accessible information about the University of Houston, the Southwest Conference, and UH football attendance.
