2017 Houston Cougar Football Preview

It seems trite, and even insensitive, to write about college football as the as the death, property damage and human suffering tolls of Harvey mount. This is especially true for the Houston Cougars, whose players might have family members affected by the catastrophe and whose own facilities have been damaged by the floodwaters. The program's season opener against Texas-San Antonio, which was scheduled for this weekend, has been postponed.

With that said, we're all going to need some semblance of normalcy to return as the floodwaters recede and as college football season begins.* So what can be expected from the UH football program this fall?

Looking Back: the 2016 season started off with high hopes for the Cougars, who began the season with a signature upset of Oklahoma, and at one point were ranked as high as #6 in the AP poll before crashing down against Navy and SMU. Ravaged by injuries and constant rumors about the future of head coach Tom Herman (who fled to Austin at season's end), the Cougars ended the 2016 season unranked, with an 9-4 record and a bowl loss. USA Today gives the Cougars a C+ on the season; I know several UH fans who probably would have given the team an even lower grade, given the expectations they had going in to the season.

I accurately predicted that the Coogs would end the regular season with a 9-3 record (although I predicted one of the losses to be against Oklahoma, not Friggin' SMU!). The fact that the Cougars could beat Oklahoma and Louisville but still not end the season ranked was a disappointment for me.

The Big Story for 2017: for the second time in three seasons and the third time in six, the program has a new coaching staff. Former offensive coordinator Major Applewhite takes over the reigns as head coach. I've been familiar with Applewhite for about 20 years, as he was quarterback at Texas when I was a graduate student there. Applewhite's new offensive coordinator is Brian Johnson, whose previous coaching experience was at Utah and Mississippi State. Mark D'Onofrio, who was previously at Miami, is defensive coordinator.

Reasons for Optimism: the Cougars have some talent returning. Notably, defensive tackle Ed Oliver, a preseason All-American who may be one of the best defensive players in the country. Linebacker Matthew Adams, who led the team in tackles last year, returns as well. Seniors Khalil Williams and Garrett Davis anchor the secondary. On the offensive side of the ball, highly-recruited Texas A&M transfer Kyle Allen is expected to take the reigns as starting quarterback. He'll be joined in the backfield by Duke Catalon, who was the team's leading rusher last year, and will have experienced targets in the form of senior wide receivers Linell Bonner and Steven Dunbar.

Another reason for optimism is that the Cougars aren't going into 2017 with the same set of pressures and distractions that they were facing a year ago. They're not in the conversation as a potential "playoff buster" this season, the Big XII expansion farce is not an issue this season, and they don't have to spend every week this season hearing chatter that their head coach is the top candidate for other jobs. The team might play better without these distractions hanging over their heads.

Reasons for Pessimism: aside from the uncertainty that a new coaching staff brings, the Cougars are also having to fill the holes left by the departures of many talented players, including quarterback Greg Ward Jr, wide receiver Chance Allen, linebacker (and second-round draft pick) Tyus Bowser, linebacker Steven Taylor, and defensive backs Howard and Brandon Wilson. It doesn't give me a lot of comfort that new DC Mark D'Onofrio was unemployed the entire 2016 season, or that Miami fans inundated Cougar message boards after UH hired him to tell us how horrible he was there and how big of a mistake we made by hiring him. The biggest problem on the offensive side of the ball is the offensive line, which gave up 98 TFLs last season. They're still suspect until proven otherwise.

The Schedule: the Cougars face two beatable P5 schools - Arizona and Texas Tech - and get the three teams that beat them last year - Navy, Memphis and SMU - at home this fall. It remains to be seen if the UTSA game will be rescheduled; that could have a significant effect on the team if, for example, it replaces the November 11 open date.

What the Pigskin Pundits Think: they're all over the place. Some people are a bit bearish on the Coogs; Athlon predicts a seven-win season for the Coogs, as does USA Today. Others are more optimistic: SBNation predicts a nine-win season for UH, CBS Sports thinks the Coogs will win at least nine games, and Saturday Blitz sees a ten-win campaign. Yardbarker doesn't predict a record but does think that the Cougars will have a better record without Tom Herman.

What the Computers Think: for whatever reason, the machines are all pretty optimistic. Sagarin seeds the Cougars in the #46 spot with a rating of 75.77. That implies a record of 10-2 when opponent ratings and home field advantage are taken into account. The Congrove algorithm, likewise, predicts a 10-2 record. Massey foresees a 9-3 campaign for the Coogs. ESPN's FPI, which has been updated to exclude the UTSA game, predicts a 9-2 record for the Cougars.

What I Think: a ten-win season would be a great start to the Major Applewhite era and a wonderful rebound from the relative disappointment of a year ago. Alas, I just don't see it happening. I think the Cougars have lost too much talent from a season ago, there's too much uncertainty surrounding the new coaching staff, no help has been provided to the struggling O-line (i.e. in the form of JUCO transfers), and Harvey and its aftermath will have a negative effect on the team's focus.

I predict a 7-5 record for the Cougars (6-5 if the UTSA game is not rescheduled).

*It already has, for two local universities. Although I'm sure it was a great experience for the players, did Rice really have to travel all he way to Australia just to get trounced by Stanford?!

(UPDATE: The UTSA will not be rescheduled.)

Harvey

I had planned to spend this weekend relaxing, unpacking boxes, doing some shopping and writing my season preview for the upcoming UH football season. However, Hurricane Harvey - a storm that just a week ago was expected to pass over the Yucatan Peninsula and move into Central Mexico as a weak tropical storm, but which instead broke towards the northwest and made landfall in Aransas Bay as a Category Four Hurricane last Friday evening and then stalled out - has altered my plans, as well as those of millions of others in the Houston region.

The good news is that my girlfriend, our animals and I am fine. I think my decision to move from a house that nearly flooded during the Memorial Day flood of a couple of years ago to the fourth floor of a concrete-block midrise apartment was a good one. My parents likewise, are fine. They experienced some street flooding but it didn’t get into any houses in their neighborhood. Ditto for Kirby and Lori.

The bad news is that I can’t say the same for tends of thousands of others in the Houston area, who have suffered catastrophic flooding of their homes and are being evacuated, in many cases by boat or by helicopter. Some of my friends have homes that have taken on water, or have roofs that are leaking from the sheer amount and duration of rainfall. The amount of rain that has fallen over the Houston area over the past three days has been unprecedented; the total rain amounts are easily going to surpass those for Tropical Storm Alison, whose massive 2001 flood was until now the region's benchmark for a devastating rain event.

                                                                                                  Jordan Tessler, Washington Post

Entire neighborhoods are flooded. Rivers and bayous are out of their banks and continue to rise. The city's roads and highways are underwater and travel around the area is next to impossible. Public transportation has been suspended; school districts have canceled classes for the week. Both airports are closed until at least Wednesday. Floodwaters have forced Ben Taub Hospital to be evacuated and have knocked a local TV station off the air. The visual reality of the flood is stunning:

It's not over yet, either. Harvey remains at tropical storm strength, and is forecast to loop back out over the Gulf of Mexico and come in again closer to the city. This means that more rain is probably on the way:

Some corners of social and traditional media are already comparing Harvey to Hurricane Katrina. It’s too early, of course, to survey the true impact of the storm, especially since it’s not over yet; it’s going to take weeks to truly understand Harvey’s devastation. But when I see the images on the news - of desperate people being plucked from their roofs by helicopters, of people walking through waist-deep water to seek shelter, of senior citizens sitting in floodwater while they wait to be rescued, of evacueees being sent to the George R Brown Convention Center - the parallels to Katrina are eerily similar.

I’ve been told to stay home from work for the next couple of days, so I’m not going to go anywhere. I will post more updates as the situation warrants.

Obligatory eclipse photo

Your Facebook feed was clogged with them today, so one more won't hurt:

I took this picture of the partially-eclipsed sun shining through the clouds with my iPhone; it actually turned out much nicer than the pictures I took when no clouds were in the way. Here in Houston, about 2/3rd of the sun was obscured at maximum eclipse. 

I'm already looking forward to the 2024 eclipse, because I won't have to travel too far to see it in totality. 

The teenager

As of today, my son turns 13 years old. You've come a long way, boy!

(Also: God help us all.)

Resuming transmissions

In my previous post I said I didn't intend to take a true hiatus from this blog over the summer months, but that's exactly how things turned out.

Which is to say, it's been a busy few months, and there's just wasn't any time to generate new posts. There were vacations to New Orleans (Kirby, my girlfriend and I took the Sunset Limited there, reprising, in the other direction, the train ride I took several years ago) and Cancun (including a stopover in Mexico City); there was a trip to central Texas for my aunt's 95th (!) birthday; I finally got to see a legend in concert; I got to do some fishing down at the Gulf; and, I moved.

Yes, the move was a real pain in the ass. It didn't help that I had to put all my stuff in storage and hang out at my parents for a few weeks while my girlfriend and I waited for our new place to become available. But we're here now, in a nice unit at a new apartment complex near Greenway Plaza. We're nowhere near finished unpacking - there are still boxes everywhere - but with every passing day this place feels more and more like home and my girlfriend and I are excited to begin the next phase of our lives here.

However, now that the move is complete and another football season is upon us - I received my UH football season tickets just a few days ago - it's time for the writing to resume. I'll have my customary season preview up in a few days (although it's going to be difficult to write because I really don't know what to expect from the Cougars this fall). I've also resolved to do what I didn't do for last year's big vacation, and put up some pictures of our trip to Mexico.

It's that time of year again

The Rockets' season came to a rather ignominious end on Thursday night, Kirby is down to his final two weeks of sixth grade, the University of Houston's academic year ended with a speech from the Ahnold the Governator, and the cooler, drier weather we experienced this weekend is most likely "going to be our last true front of spring." All this means is that, regrettably, another miserable Houston summer is upon us.

That also means that it's time for me to do what I successfully avoided doing a year ago, and find a new place to live. I've enjoyed my five years in Bellaire, but my wallet has not, and so it's time to seek housing that's a bit more in line with my socioeconomic status. I'm not looking forward to packing and moving - I haven't even begun putting things in boxes yet and as I look around this house I'm already feeling overwhelmed at what I'm going to do with all this stuff I've managed to accumulate - but the time has come. I'll be combining households with my girlfriend at my new place, which will lesson the financial burden somewhat but which will also mean a big step towards the next phase of my life, depending on how things work out.

There are also a couple of summer trips planned: the usual June trip to New Orleans and a weeklong vacation to Cancun in July. It's been over a decade since I was last in Cancun, so I'm looking forward to heading down there again and sitting my fat ass on a beach with a beer in hand for the entire week. Maybe I'll manage to see some Mayan ruins, too.

Unlike last year, I'm not taking a formal summer hiatus from this blog, but posting activity will probably be very light for the next few months for the reasons I just mentioned.

May everybody have a great summer.

Little things that make me chuckle

The American Athletic Conference had more players drafted in this year's NFL Draft than the Big 12:

That the Big 12 struggled to produce draft picks is not surprising. The league doesn’t recruit as well as the other power conferences and hasn’t for years. It has one elite program these days, Oklahoma, with Oklahoma State a tier below that and Texas still trying to find itself. D’Onta Foreman was the only Texas player picked, which really hurts the league’s numbers. The Horns are making progress, at least. 

It’s also a small conference with just 10 teams, and the league passed on expanding last year. The Big 12 got 1.4 picks per team, compared to 1.25 for AAC teams. 

Some of the schools the Big 12 was reportedly considering most seriously — Houston, Cincinnati, and UConn — are in the league that’s now produced more 2017 picks. That isn’t a good look for the league’s administration, even if it’s just a PR hit. 

The Big 12's small membership and comparatively poor recruiting are both ingredients that make it harder to churn out professionals. The Big 12 is worse-positioned than each of the SEC, ACC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 to get players picked. 

The Big 12: college football’s fifth-best conference, but sixth in the 2017 draft.

It's just one draft but, yeah, I'm enjoying a wee bit of schadenfreude.

Congratulations and good luck, but the way, to all the Cougars headed to the NFL.

Another "carmageddon" that wasn't

Following a fire that collapsed part of the busy I-85 freeway in Atlanta, it was feared that the loss of a key traffic linkage would cause havoc in the already-congested city for months while the freeway was repaired. But that didn't happen, because people adjusted their driving habits accordingly once they were aware that the section of freeway was out of service:

So what’s going on here? Arguably, our mental model of traffic is just wrong. We tend to think of traffic volumes, and trip-making generally as inexorable forces of nature. The diurnal flow of 250,000 vehicles a day on an urban freeway like I-85 is just as regular and predictable as the tides. What this misses is that there’s a deep behavioral basis to travel. Human beings will shift their behavior in response to changing circumstances. If road capacity is impaired, many people can decide not to travel, change when they travel, change where they travel, or even change their mode of travel. The fact that Carmageddon almost never comes is powerful evidence of induced demand: people travel on roadways because the capacity is available for their trips, and when the capacity goes away, so does much of the trip making.

I've pointed this out before, but it bears repeating: motorists are not water molecules. Shutting down a freeway is not the same as closing a valve on a pipe and causing water to back up. Motorists make choices as to where to drive or to drive at all, and if they aware of a major closure, they will choose alternate routes to get to their destination or decide not to make the trip at all.

It's also why widening or expanding highways does nothing, in the long term, to solve traffic congestion.

The not-so-friendly skies

I'm just as disgusted as everyone else about the story of the passenger who was bloodied and dragged off an overbooked United flight from Chicago to Louisville because he refused to give up his seat to make room for crewmembers that needed to be ferried to Louisville.

I understand the concept behind overbooking. And I understand that, legally, United Airlines (or in this case, their subsidiary, Republic Airlines) had every right to force the guy off their plane.

But there's the legal world, and then there's the world of common human decency. What kind of world do we live in when something this grotesque is allowed to happen?

“Once you’re offloading passengers who’ve already boarded so that you can get employees on the flight, you’d think they’d do just about anything to avoid that,” said Seth Kaplan, editor of the Airline Weekly trade publication. 

Others echoed the sentiment that United probably could’ve handled the situation better. 

“I’ve seen a lot in my 40 years covering and working for the airline industry, but this is historically bad public relations,” says George Hobica, president of Airfarewatchdog. “The burning question is why did they wait until everyone was seated before realizing they needed to move employees?”

Yep. This should have been handled before the guy was allowed to board the plane. The euphemism the airline industry uses for cases like these, when overbooking requires a passenger to be bumped off a flight, is "involuntarily denied boarding." But the passenger wasn't denied boarding. He was allowed on the plane, presumably because he had a boarding pass with a seat number on it, and he was sitting in his seat when the flight attendants and gate agents selected him for removal.

The passenger, a doctor (whose background is utterly irrelevant to the incident at hand) who claimed he had patients to see in Louisville the following day, refused to get off the plane after he was (apparently randomly) selected for removal, which is when things escalated. Vox's Alex Abad-Santos wonders about the thought process behind the brutal forced removal: what United staff member(s) actually thought this was a good idea?

But the complaint here is that it seems like there are missing steps between asking a man to leave an overbooked flight because he’s been bumped and, if he refuses, knocking that man to the ground and dragging him off the plane, busting his lip in the process.

If every airline deals with denied involuntary boardings — some 8,955 occurred between October and December 2016, according to the DOT report — why did this one result in someone literally being dragged into the aisle? Is that a reflection of United’s policy? And is United’s valuing its policy over its customers indicative of a bigger problem in the industry?

It’s hard to imagine another industry getting away with rescinding services that have already been paid for.

“How many businesses do you know of that can sell you a good or service, accept payment, and then withdraw that good or service unilaterally for their own purposes — much less by force?” Michael Hiltzik wrote for the Los Angeles Times.

Imagine if a restaurant charged you for a meal and then made you leave before it was served. Imagine if you paid for a haircut but your barber stopped partway through and made you live with it until he could reschedule your appointment.

Put another way, people are outraged at the way United treated this person, because they are frustrated by the way the domestic airline industry treats their customers as a whole. As The Atlantic's Derek Thompson notes, this is a symptom of a larger problem in the airline industry:

But although this incident was unusual in many respects, it was also representative of an airline industry that has considerable power over consumers—even if the use of force is more subtle than a group of security professionals wrestling a passenger to the floor. 

For example, many people have pointed out that United might have avoided the entire fiasco by simply offering the passengers more money to leave the plane. By law, compensation for passengers is capped at $1,350, which means that United technically could have raised its offer by more than 50 percent before removing people against their will. But it’s absurd that airlines’ capacity to compensate passengers is bounded by the law in the first place. Indeed, there’s a good case to remove the cap entirely. If airlines are legally permitted to overbook—that is, to sell consumers a service that they will not fulfill—they ought to pay market price to compensate people for the unfulfilled promise. 

Domestic airlines are now enjoying record profits, having flown more passengers each year since 2010. This is in part because the airline industry is sheltered from both antitrust regulation and litigation. Four carriers—United, Delta, American, and Southwest—earn more than $20 billion in profits annually and own 80 percent of seats on domestic flights. Along with cable companies, airlines are the top-of-mind paragon for industries that seem to get worse for consumers as they become more heavily concentrated. Indeed, when fuel prices fell last year, as The Atlantic’s Joe Pinsker (who edited this story and who has a relative who works at United) has written, airlines spent the savings on stock buybacks rather than pass them to consumers.

Meanwhile, if customers are shocked by the fine print of United’s contract of carriage, what recourse do they have against the company? Very little. In the last decade, class-action lawsuits have become endangered thanks to a series of Supreme Court rulings that have undercut consumer rights. Disputes over fine-print regulation are increasingly likely to be settled in arbitration, without a judge or jury, where the deck is stacked against the individual plaintiff and the decisions are practically impossible to appeal. 

In this way, the United video serves as a stark metaphor, one where the quiet brutalization of consumers is rendered in shocking, literal form. The first thought that I had watching the outrageous footage of a passenger being dragged through an aisle like a bag of trash was that this should never happen. But fundamentally, this is an old story: Companies in concentrated industries, like the airlines, have legal cover to break the most basic promise to consumers without legally breaking their contracts. The video is a scandal. But so is the law.

A depressing situation, indeed, and one that makes me never want to fly United again (even though I probably will, by virtue of the fact that Houston is one of their fortress hubs and I also still have a significant amount of frequent flyer miles with them that I need to use). But there are some silver linings to this otherwise gruesome incident:

United's stock is taking a beating. The company's tone-deaf CEO was forced to issue a second, more contrite apology today because the statement he issued about the incident yesterday went over like a lead balloon. The Chicago police officer involved in the brutal removal has reportedly been suspended. Late night hosts and other airlines are taking their shots at United. Today the internet was flooded with hilarious and savage memes at the airline's expense. And, most importantly, the outrage being generated by this incident indicates that, even in our hyper-corpratized world, there are still things that companies cannot do to their customers without sparking furious outrage and backlash.

Crawfish season

Texas Monthly's John Nova Lomax explores Houston's love affair with the succulent crustacean; notably, the fact that the love affair is relatively recent:

It wasn’t always this way in Houston. As recently as the 1980s, crawfish were still seen as impossibly exotic. “You want me to suck the what?” was often heard.  

Jim Gossen remembers those days, and as chairman of Louisiana Sysco Seafood, he’s been an integral part in bringing about the cultural shift. Despite selling the company to Sysco a few years ago, the Lafayette native still runs the company he founded in 1972. Gossen moved to Houston in 1975, because, as he says, that was “where the market was.” Houston didn’t know it then, but Gossen, through his involvement in pioneering Cajun-style restaurants such as Don’s, Willie G’s, and the Magnolia Bar & Grill and events like the Spring Crawfish Festival, has changed the way Houstonians (and by extension, all Texans) eat forever. 

Gossen now believes that more crawfish are consumed in Greater Houston than in the entire state of Louisiana, and for that, he is the one man most responsible. Yes, he had his contemporaries out there in the 1970s spreading the Mudbug Gospel: Ray Hay’s (today’s Ragin’ Cajun) and the tragically closed NASA-area Cajun stronghold Pe-Te’s among them, both of which catered to homesick Cajuns in Houston for oil patch jobs.  

The first wave of zydeco’s popularity also brought crawfish into Houston’s culinary scene. Ken Watkins recalls eating crawfish at African-American Catholic parish hall gigs by zydeco titan Clifton Chenier in the 1970s, where “everybody was having a party.” (As many a zydeco performer has said from the bandstand over the years, Louisiana is the place where “even the crawfish have soul.”) 

Even given all that, when Gossen helped open Don’s, he could hardly give the critters away. 

“When I opened up Don’s in 1976 I couldn’t sell three sacks a week,” he says from his car, en route to another dining adventure in the bayous of Louisiana, where he still owns two homes. “What I would do is boil them, and whatever I had left over on Sunday, I would put on a plate as a garnish, just so people could see what they looked like.” 

Crustacean parsley? Huh. 

Needless to say, Houston's come a long way from those days, thanks at least partly to Gossen's efforts. The popularity of crawfish grew throughout the 80s and 90s; more recently, the post-Katrina influx of Louisianans to Houston has swelled the ranks of the city's mudbug aficionados. The inception of commercial farming of crawfish by rice growers in Louisiana and eastern Texas, who realized they could raise them in their flooded fields, also helped by improving the crustacean's quality and availability. 

As the popularity of boiled crawfish grew, distinctive cooking styles developed:

Houston crawfish are prepared in variations on three main styles: purist Cajun (spices in the boil), Texan (spices on the shells), and Vietnamese. Some of Gossen’s earliest customers at the Magnolia were large parties of Vietnamese immigrants.  Since then, Vietnamese Houstonians have made Houston into a year-round crawfish city, thanks to their importation of Asian crustaceans that never go out of season. They also have their own way of preparing them: adding ginger and lemongrass to the traditional seasonings, fruits and spices of mustard seed, lemon, garlic, onion, and bay leaves. Viet-Houston crawfish also come with spicy butter-garlic sauces. With its roots in both regional bayous and distant (though equally sultry) Vietnam, some Bayou City foodies have declared this dish Houston’s signature fare. 

You also have Vietnamese American cooks who make them Cajun-style. One such is Khon Lu, owner of Khon’s Wine Darts Coffee Art in Midtown Houston, Lu hosts crawfish boils at his establishment when the mood strikes him. “I make mine Cajun style, with fresh and dry ingredients,” Lu said. “I’m a traditionalist when it comes to crawfish. The only thing that should be on your fingers are the cayenne peppers and spices. The boil should be clean and devoid of oils and butter. The Vietnam style is basically stir fried in butter after they’re dunked.”

I usually go to Khon's at least a couple of times every season for his crawfish; they are so good that even my New Orleanian girlfriend looks forward to his boils. Here's what a plate of his crawfish looked like last Sunday:

To be sure, not everybody in Houston is a fan of crawfish. A fairly common remark is that peeling and eating them "takes too much work" relative to the amount of meat you get from them. They can get messy, and some people can't handle the spiciness with which they are traditionally cooked. 

True, there is work involved in getting to the meat in the tail (and, if they are large enough, the claws); crawfish is an activity as much as it is a food. But - aside from the fact that if the meat is good, then the work is worth it! - that very activity is why a typical crawfish boil is just as much of a social event as it is dinner. People gather over large communal plates or newspaper spreads of freshly-boiled crawfish to talk and laugh as they peel tails, crack claws, sip beer and consume entire rolls of paper towels in a futile effort to keep their hands clean. This social feature might be just as responsible for crawfish's popularity as the tender and flavorful meat itself.

Houstonia dedicated much of March's issue to crawfish, including their list of the best places to get traditional Cajun and Vietnamese crawfish in Houston, the best local beers to pair with crawfish, and some suggestions for your next boil.

Crawfish season traditionally lasts into the summer, but March and April are generally the best months for quality. So get 'em while there's still time. Bon appétit!