Merry Christmas!

Here's to hoping that everybody has a wonderful holiday season, and best wishes for 2012!

Cougar football: a new coach and a new conference

The last few weeks have been pretty crappy ones for Cougar football fans such as myself. I've been so bummed out that I haven't been able to bring myself to write anything about the end of the season until now.

After making it through the entire regular season undefeated, the Cougars suffered a catastrophic 28-49 loss at home to Southern Miss in the Conference USA Championship Game. The Cougars were unfocused, uninspired, and completely befuddled by a superior Golden Eagle gameplan. The offense was out of sync and unable to move the ball against USM. Case Keenum was off-target much of the time and threw two interceptions, and when he did find his receivers they oftentimes couldn't catch the ball. The rushing game, meanwhile, could only manage 55 total yards of offense all afternoon. The UH defense was similarly exposed, giving up touchdown passes of 69 and 61 yards and allowing 207 yards to USM's rushing attack. Special teams performed poorly as well, allowing a punt to be blocked and returned for an easy Golden Eagle touchdown.

It was the Cougars' worst performance of the year and it came at the worst possible time. The nationally-televised loss cost the Coogs their shot at a BCS Bowl (and all the money and prestige it would entail), any chance Case Keenum had of even being invited to the Heisman Trophy ceremony evaporated, and the team plummeted in the AP rankings from #7 to #20. If the Coogs lose to Penn State in the Ticketcity Bowl in Dallas on January 2nd, they will likely become the first team in college football history to win twelve games and not even end the season ranked in the top 25. Richard Justice, in one of his last columns as a Houston Chronicle sportswriter, explains just how costly the loss was for the UH football program:

Rather than the Sugar Bowl's estimated $17 million payoff, the Coogs likely will be getting around $1 million. Because bowl money is shared with 11 other Conference USA members, UH's net loss probably is $2.5 million.

Also lost were prestige and a chance to prove once and for all that UH belonged on the national stage. Unfortunately, UH proved all the people who had doubts correct.

The 12-1 Coogs will forever be seen as a paper tiger that rode a weak schedule up the ladder, and when confronted with a real test were run off the field.

"It was a very, very tough locker room, obviously, for a lot of guys who've accomplished a lot this year," UH head coach Kevin Sumlin said.

UH fans will forever wonder if Sumlin was fully engaged with his team during a week when his name was connected with the job openings at Texas A&M and Arizona State.

There's absolutely no doubt that the rumors flying about Kevin Sumlin's possible move to Texas A&M the week of the game served as a distraction to the team, and, quite frankly, after blowing the most important game of his career to date, many UH fans (myself included) were ready to see him go. A week and a half after the conference championship loss, Sumlin finally made it official: he was headed to College Station to become the next head coach of the Texas A&M Aggies.

It remains to be seen if the Aggies will be pleased with Sumlin (or $cumlin, as he's now known on UH athletics message boards) at the helm of their football program. While there's no denying that he's a good coach based on what he did here at Houston, the fact is that he is 0-2 in championship games in lowly Conference USA and, more tellingly, is also 3-7 without Case Keenum at quarterback. As such, I'm somewhat skeptical that Sumlin will be able to lead the Aggies to great success as they join the SEC - the nation's toughest football conference and a conference he has no previous coaching experience in - next year. We'll see.

With Sumlin's departure, assistant head coach Tony Levine was elevated to the head coaching position on an interim basis. A few days ago, the "interim" was removed from his job title as Athletics Director Mack Rhoades officially introduced him as the program's next head coach. The 39-year-old Levine had been an assistant at UH since the 2008 season; he played wide receiver at the University of Minnesota and his experience as an assistant includes stints at the high school, college and professional levels. While the players and some UH faithful reacted positively to the hire, other UH fans who were hoping for a "name" coach were less enthused. Of course, only time will tell if Levine will be successful here, but I imagine he can quickly make a lot of new friends if he is able to lead the Coogs to victory in the Ticketcity.com bowl next week.

As head coach, Levine will have one advantage that no previous UH coach has had: membership in an automatically-qualifying BCS conference. The falling dominoes of conference realignment that have occurred over the past several months - Texas A&M and Missouri to the SEC, TCU and West Virginia to the Big XII, Pittsburgh and Syracuse to the ACC - meant that a spot had finally opened for Houston in one of the nation's six AQ conferences. Earlier this month, the Big East announced that Houston, along with Central Florida, SMU, Boise State and San Diego State, will be joining that conference in time for the 2013 season.

Critics point out that this move by the Big East is a desperate attempt to remain viable, that the geographic spread of the conference is unwieldy, and that there's no guarantee that the Big East will be able to retain its BCS berth long-term, especially since the current BCS arrangement expires after the 2013 season. And that's all true. But it's also true that the new Big East is still, top-to-bottom, a stronger conference than C-USA. The fact that the Big East remains a power basketball conference doesn't hurt, either. In the end, this move was a no-brainer for the University of Houston.

There's nothing for the Cougar football program to do now except lick its wounds and move on. The Ticketcity.com bowl provides a chance for redemption, and although 2012 will be something of a rebuilding year for a team losing so many talented seniors, it will give Levine time to grow into his role as coach and get the team ready for Big East play in 2013.

But oh, what could have been...

ESPN College Gameday

Yesterday ESPN College Gameday came to the University of Houston for the very first time. Kirby and I went up to campus to check out the festivities, as they were.
Early in the morning, some posters on UH message boards were wringing their hands about what the perceived as a "sparse" crowd behind the College Gameday set, which they felt looked bad on television. However, by by the time we got there shortly after 10 am, the crowd was pretty decent.
Here's another view of the crowd right behind the College Gameday set. Houston's cheerleaders were prominently featured, but SMU's cheer squad was also in attendance made it on TV as well. Kirby poses in front of the famous ESPN College Gameday bus.
This is as close as I could get to the set itself. That's Lee Corso on the left and Kirk Herbstreit on the right.
One more crowd shot. The maroon Washington State flag in the center somehow makes its appearance at every ESPN College Gameday show every Saturday.
In a moment that will go down in University of Houston Cougar lore, at the conclusion of the broadcast Lee Corso uttered an expletive before he put on the Shasta head and predicted Houston to defeat Southern Methodist. We weren't standing in front of a speaker, so we didn't hear it at the time (which is probably a good thing for Kirby's sake), but the incident quickly made it on to YouTube. The reaction from the rest of the ESPN crew (as well as UH track legend Carl Lewis, seen wearing red in the picture above) is priceless (language warning):

Corso later went back on television and apologized for his outburst.

The Cougar nation also got some national props for "the coolest kid ever," the son of a former UH player who dressed up as the Heisman Trophy.

As it turned out, Corso's profanity-laced prognostication was correct. That afternoon, the Cougars convincingly defeated SMU, 37-7, to notch their eleventh straight victory of the season. This Friday the Cougars will square off against Tulsa, with the winner capturing the Conference USA Western Division.

Only time will tell when, or even if, ESPN College Gameday makes another visit to the University of Houston campus. But yesterday's event was a real treat, and the publicity was a real boon to the school, its students, its fans and its football program. Go Coogs!

Iowa State knocks off #2 Oklahoma State, 37-31

I'm wondering if I should include this game on my list of the top ten upsets in college football history, should I ever decide to update it. The Cowboys went into Ames as 27-point favorites. They leave with their national title hopes likely crushed.

Granted, Oklahoma State was playing one day after their women's basketball coach, Kurt Budke, was killed, along with three others, in a plane crash. That may have affected the team's focus. It's also possible that the Cowboys were looking past a 5-4 Iowa State team and were thinking about their big showdown with Oklahoma the following weekend.

But still: with a shot at the national title on the line, the Cowboys should have taken care of business. It just goes to show that anything can happen in college football, and that making it through the regular season undefeated is a rare feat indeed.

Which is why I'm worried about the Cougars against SMU tomorrow...

The Astros in the American League

Pardon me while I vomit:

MLB commissioner Bud Selig announced Thursday afternoon that the sale of the Houston Astros from former owner Drayton McLane to new owner Jim Crane has been unanimously approved.

As part of the agreement, the Astros will be moved to the American League West in 2013, with Crane getting a $70 million discount on the sale price of the team. That will even out baseball’s two leagues at 15 teams apiece and allow for the fair implementation of two additional Wild Card spots. It also means that interleague play is going to be a year-round thing.

I knew this was coming as part of the sale of the franchise to the new owner, and I understand Major League Baseball's desire to equalize the number of teams in the two leagues (the National League currently has 16 teams while the American League has 14). But, as somebody who grew up a loyal follower of the National League, I don't like it.

I don't like the designated hitter. It takes a lot of strategy out of the game.

I don't like the fact that the Astros will be giving up their long-standing divisional rivalries against teams like the Cardinals, Cubs and Reds and replacing them with new divisional "rivals" like the Angels, A's and Mariners.

I don't like the fact that playing those new divisional "rivals" on the road means 9 pm start times for television.

I don't like the fact that the presence of insufferably arrogant Yankees and Red Sox fans will now be an annual occurrence at Minute Maid Park.

I don't even like the fact that the Astros will get to play the Texas Rangers more often since both teams will now be in the same division. The two teams already play each other every year anyway. Big deal.

Nope. Don't like it at all.

To be fair to new owner Jim Crane: the move was forced on him. He didn't have a choice.

Of course, if he can't breathe some life back into the moribund team, which lost a franchise-record 106 games last season, it really won't matter which league the Astros are in because they won't be worth watching anyway.

The Astros will move to the American League beginning in the 2013 season.

Cougars are 10-0 and can make it into the BCS if they win out

Time to breathe some life back into this blog.

I had actually started several posts over the last month and a half - about the death of Steve Jobs, about the Cougars, about the tragedy that has occurred at Penn State - but for whatever reason I never got around to finishing any of them in a timely manner. I just been too busy or too lazy to put up any new entries, hence the lack of recent posts.

But enough excuses. I want to take a few minutes to gloat about the University of Houston Cougar football program, which is having its best season since the Run and Shoot era of the late 80s.

Right now, they are 10-0 and are only one of three undefeated teams remaining in FBS (LSU and Oklahoma State being the other two). They are ranked #11 in the BCS standings; if the Coogs manage to win the rest of their games (SMU this weekend, at Tulsa the day after Thanksgiving, and then the C-USA Conference Championship, most likely at Robertson against Southern Mississippi) they are assured of a spot in one of the BCS bowl games. QB Case Keenum's name is beginning to reappear in Heisman conversations. This is happening even as rumors of impending announcements regarding Houston's move to the automatically-qualifying Big East conference and groundbreaking for a new stadium continue to circulate.

Oh, and did I mention the ESPN College Football Gameday is coming to Houston this Saturday for the first time ever?

Indeed, it's an amazing time to be a UH football fan. One decade after the infamous 0-11 season that marked the low point of Cougar football, the Coogs have a chance to end the regular season undefeated and "bust the BCS." But the road ahead is not going to be easy. SMU knocked off TCU earlier this season and has a potent offense. Tulsa has a mobile quarterback in D. J. Kinne that is sure to give the Houston defense fits and road games are never easy. And Southern Miss, should the Cougars meet them in the conference championship, is 9-1 and is ranked #20. The team can see the promised land off in the distance, but it's going to be an uphill climb to get there.

This is to take nothing away from the season that the Coogs have had so far. I've enjoyed every minute of it. But now that they've gotten this far, there would still be a sense of disappointment if they didn't finish the journey. It's all in their hands.

Go Coogs!

Honest Abe

For somebody who's about to load up on candy, Kirby doesn't look too happy. Either that, or he's completely "in character," considering that Abraham Lincoln never exactly looked happy in any of his photographs...
Happy Halloween, everyone!

Cougars at 4-0

Can it really be possible that one-third of the college football season is over already? It feels like it just started...

Anyway, the Coogs are 4-0 and I only have a few things to say about their last two games.

Houston 35, Louisiana Tech 34: yes, so this was the biggest comeback in University of Houston football history. Down by 27 points with 5:11 remaining in the third quarter, the Cougars rattled off 28 answered points for a thrilling win over the Bulldogs in Ruston. And that's great, except for one thing: it shouldn't have come to that.

The reason the Cougars had to mount such an incredible second-half comeback is because they played like absolute crap for the first 40 minutes of the game. They weren't prepared, they were sloppy and out of synch on both sides of the ball, and they let Louisiana Tech, a team that was led by a 17-year-old true freshman at quarterback and was taken into overtime by FCS program Central Arkansas the week before, utterly dominate them. Why? Moreover, why do these lackluster starts requiring such heroic comebacks happen so often? As Dustin Resnik argues:

As much as you might want to, you can't ignore how the first two and a half quarters played out. How does Houston, a team with hopes of becoming the next BCS buster or joining a BCS conference, get outplayed so massively by a mediocre-looking Louisiana Tech squad?

Every time the Cougars show flashes of brilliance, there's a slip up. For every huge comeback, there was two and a half quarters of ineptitude. For every 2009 stunner of Oklahoma State and Texas Tech, there is the UTEP loss from the same year.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to bring you down after a win for the ages. But there are better teams than Louisiana Tech left on the schedule. We'll know the Cougars have really made it when they don't need the 27-point comeback.

Can the Coogs find a way to play with that same intensity - to bottle that 20 minutes and play like that for an entire game? Because that would be something to see.

I agree. It's time for this talented, senior-laden team to play with full intensity from the opening kickoff. 27-point comebacks might be thrilling, but they're not necessary if the team plays the way they should.

Houston 56, Georgia State 0: fortunately, there were to be no problems with slow starts at home last weekend against an FCS Georgia State football program that is in only its second year of existence. The game was really little more than a scrimmage for the Cougars, as they rolled up 732 yards of total offense. Case Keenum was pulled in the third quarter after completing 29 of 34 passes for 415 yards and two touchdowns and Houston notched their first shutout since 1999. In fact, the most remarkable thing about the game was not what happened on the field, but what happened in the stands around it: the attendance was 32,005, a number that would have been unthinkable for any UH game, let alone a game against an obscure FCS opponent, just a few years ago. It really is amazing what winning, building more on-campus housing, marketing the games to the students, and cultivating a thriving tailgating scene can do for a program that used to struggle so mightily at the gate.

Next up for the Cougars is a Thursday night trip to El Paso to play the UTEP Miners. The Miners might not be very good this year, but the Cougars have traditionally had their hands full with UTEP in the Sun Bowl and their disappointing meltdown there two years ago - another disaster which was caused by a lackluster start - is still fresh in the minds of UH faithful.

Drought could cost Houston area 66 million trees

A sobering footnote to a problem I wrote about a couple of weeks ago:

If you've driven around any of the greener areas of the city like Memorial Park or Hermann Park, you no doubt have noticed a large number of dead or dying trees covered in browning leaves well short of winter. According to Trees for Houston, the city and its surrounding counties could lose 66 million (yes, MILLION) trees as the result of a drought that doesn't show any signs of letting up.

Adding insult to injury, the city is considering spending $4.5 million to remove dead or dying trees on public property -- more than 13 times what they spend on the same service in any given year. The number of trees they would remove if city council approves the measure would be around 15,000 from parks and esplanades.

As the drought continues with little end in sight, more trees will likely succumb to dehydration as well as bugs and disease that ravage trees weakened by the dry conditions.

That is a staggeringly depressing result of the drought. Not only will losing so many trees take an aesthetic toll on the area, but it will also result in economic loss (not only do trees raise property values, but now the city is having to spend money it doesn't have cutting so many dead ones down). The negative impacts of tree loss on this scale will also extend to erosion control, floodwater absorption (assuming it ever floods in Houston again), shading and cooling (trees help reverse the urban heat island effect) and air quality. Furthermore, given the time it takes for the tree canopy to regenerate, these negative effects could be particularly long-lasting.

Houston 48, North Texas 23

Last weekend I took Kirby up to Denton to see the Houston play North Texas in the inaugural game at Apogee Stadium. The $78 million stadium is a sorely-needed replacement for Fouts Field, which was built in 1951 and which was where I watched many a Mean Green football game when I lived in Denton.
As the University of Houston continues to move towards constructing a replacement for aging Robertson Stadium, there are definitely a lot of lessons they can learn from Apogee's design. The sightlines were good and the concession areas were well-planned. I especially liked the width between the seating rows, which made it possible to walk past people without bumping into their knees.
The Mean Green were clearly pumped up to be playing their very first game in their new stadium and gave the slow-starting Coogs all they could handle in the first half. Mean Green quarterback Derrick Thompson, pictured above, completed 21 of 33 passes for 172 yards and ran for another 41 yards. The Cougars did a decent job keying in on UNT's most potent weapon, holding Mean Green running back Lance Dunbar to 62 yards and a touchdown on 18 carries.
The Cougars clung toa 20-17 lead at halftime, but took over the game in the second half by scoring 28 unanswered points. In the picture above, Case Keenum stands in the shotgun flanked by running backs Michael Hayes and Bryce Beall. Keenum had an impressive outing, completing 26 of 41 passes for 458 yards and five touchdowns. Hayes led the rushing attack with 13 carries for 76 yards and a touchdown.
Kirby had a dilemma: he could either cheer for his father's undergraduate alma mater or his mother's graduate alma mater. At first he cheered for the Mean Green, but as the Cougars began to pull away he appeared to switch loyalties... The Cougars won handily, 48-23.
The Green Brigade performs at halftime (due to budgetary limitations, Houston did not bring a band or even cheerleaders in spite of the relatively short distance between Houston and Denton). The "home" side of Apogee Stadium features a nice provision of club seating and luxury boxes that simply didn't exist at Fouts Field and will hopefully generate income for the program.

A rather unique view of the stadium can be seen in this cool "gigapan" photograph. A decent contingent of UH fans were on hand for the game, as the photo shows. (Kirby and I are in the photograph, if you zoom in to the lower right side of the stadium and look carefully...)

I had expected this to be a tough game, given the circumstances, so the fact that the final score wasn't a "blowout" does not surprise or concern me. The Mean Green, meanwhile, are a team in rebuilding mode but played admirably. They will improve, and Apogee Stadium is one of the reasons why. The new stadium is attractive to fans as well as recruits and, with a seating capacity of about 31,000, is well-suited to the program's current needs. The 28,075 in attendance, in fact, is the third-largest crowd in Mean Green football history.

Kirby and I spent the night in Denton. It was a bit eerie waking up the following morning of September 11th, because Denton was where Kirby's mother and I were living when it all happened ten years ago.