Craven: The rub with Houston, and why it's hard to hang on to football success

[caption id="attachment_25838" align="alignright" width="350"]Photo by Justin Armstrong Photo by Justin Armstrong[/caption] The Astrodome helped us grow up. Tickets were cheap to Houston Cougars games in the 1990’s, so my friends and I would save up money from chores and get our parents to drop us off at the Astrodome to soak in the Coogs. Sometimes we sat the very top. Sometimes we snuck into the rich section. The sirens went off when Houston scored, but it was a rarity under John Jenkins and Kim Helton. Houston lost. It lost a lot. After Jenkins led the program to start the decade, Helton finished it off. He was 24-52-1 from 193-99 before Dan Dimel took over. By that point I had moved to Austin because my father earned a job at Dell. Games at the Astrodome were replaced with games at DKR and so goes my story. I noticed an interesting thing as a child who equally loved to play sports as much as follow. The talent around me in youth leagues dropped. Austin wasn’t home to five-star talent in football or basketball. There were a few gems floating around, but even for a kid in middle school it was clear that the level of play worsened from Houston to Austin. Yet, as I watched Texas football play, it was clear the Longhorns were better. I had ties to the program, but my brain was too small to understand the inherit disadvantages Houston faced compared to Texas. A 12 year-old has little use for capitalism. My confusion boiled down to a simple question, at least in my head: why were the college players in Austin better than the college players in Houston even though I knew the city of Houston produced more talent at the youth level? Houston football is, was and remains an untapped resource. From 1990 to 2002, Houston went 50-94-1. The Cougars finally got a hire right with Art Briles taking over before the 2003 season. Since then, the Cougars are 108-64. The city of Houston is a monster television market. It produces loads of high school talent that every program in the country recruits. The alumni base is growing and success under Tom Herman has mobilized the city behind the program only a few years into a brand new stadium. Let the internet tell it and Herman is already packing for Baton Rouge following LSU’s firing of Les Miles. The advantages of LSU are clear. It would likely provide more money to the head coach and staff, the SEC is still the best conference in football and the Tigers don’t struggle to recruit top-level talent from Texas and elsewhere. But does Herman need a move? Houston is enjoying an astonishing two-year run with Herman at the helm, already knocking off Florida State and Oklahoma to provide signature wins. He landed arguably the best player in the 2016 class with defensive tackle Ed Oliver, a Houston product. Herman has adapted to the culture of Houston and appears happy in his position. If the money available for Herman is what some Houston boosters suggest, the big card is the conference. And there’s the rub. Coaches like Briles, Kevin Sumlin and now Herman are clearing up the confusion I had as a kid. Why couldn’t Houston beat these teams from cities I had never heard of? There was no way Lubbock had more talent than Houston, so why didn’t that talent stay home? The answer, of course, was money and exposure. No actually money can exchange hands (wink, wink) so the money is spread around to nicer facilities, better coaching staffs and a bigger support system. Playing in a P5 conference offers the exposure and credibility Houston fights for in non-conference games against Oklahoma and Louisville. Winning the AAC will never mean as much as winning the Big 12 or the SEC. The Boise State route is hard to maintain, and it can be argued Boise State was never allowed in to the real party. And if Houston can’t get into the party with Herman at the helm, he might be the next great thing to leave Houston for the same reason those five-star prospects choose LSU.

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