Dark days in Cougar land. As the Mack Rhoades era has gone forward the schools athletic fortunes have grown darker. One year after leading the Cougars to an improbable NCAA tournament appearance Tom Penders was gone, replaced by washed-up never was James Dickey. Raynor Noble, the most successful baseball coach in UH history gone, replaced by Todd Whitting who has so far shown a remarkable inability to recruit and win. In golf, Jonathan Dismuke is not Keith Fergus, women's basketball coach Todd Buchanan hasn't had success (the team only won 4 games last year) at least coach Leroy Burrell is still in charge of track and field.
All of this brings us to football, which upgraded after the Art Briles departure in the form of Kevin Sumlin, but then seemed utterly rudderless when Sumlin left, promoting the special teams coach, Tony Levine, to the head spot, and going cheap on assistants. The result of this penny-pinching method of hiring coaches was the disaster you saw last Saturday. Houston fans have a right to be dismayed. If anything, this season is starting off with a very Dana Dimel feel to it, instead of red-shirting an entire class, Levine has decided offensive coordinators are disposable.
All of this is short term, a speed bump in what is supposed to be the return of the House of Coog to athletic prominence. In my mind however, the Texas St. loss illustrates some long-term issues that UH faces considering their new competition are newly minted D-1A FBS programs of Bobcats and the Roadrunners.
That's right UH fan, you're now competing with TX St. and UTSA.
Think about it, when the three schools finish their facility plans (you can find Houston's, Texas State's and UTSA's by clicking on the respective links) they're going to be roughly equal, funding and alumni support is going to be on par, and all three Universities' athletic programs have strong administrative support. If anything I'd give the edge to TX St. and UT-SA based on location alone. Where would you rather go to school? San Marcos or San Antonio? Or at the University of Houston?
For a little while, there are going to be four tiers of major college football in Texas. UT-Austin & aTM are going to be firmly at the top, Baylor, TCU & Texas Tech will make up the second tier, UH, SMU, TX St., UT-SA and UT-El Paso will make up a third tier, and UNT and Rice will, temporarily bring up the rear.
Going forward I see a three tier system developing depending on how the eventual 16-team Super Conferences play out:
Tier One: UT-Austin, aTm, TCU (let's face it, the Frogs are permanently up there with the big dogs.)
Tier Two: Texas Tech, Baylor & TX State
Tier Three: UH, SMU, UNT, UT-SA (maybe, they have the potential to move up) UTEP, Rice and UNT
The second tier has a chance to hang on in whatever the FBS eventually turns into, depending on how agile their athletic departments turn out to be. Texas Tech, for example, will probably never drop into being a second classification football program. I think eventually however all of the teams on the bottom tier will forever shunted off into what is going to be known as FCS (or whatever it's called) hell. Of the three schools I'm focusing on I see TX State and UT-SA currently having a better chance of remaining relevant than Houston.
UNT and Rice are already glorified FCS teams, I don't see any way out of the bottom for them. They'd probably be better served moving down in classification where they can compete. The thing is UH should be immune from this problem, but they're on the cusp of being passed by two Johnny-come-lately's to a party they've napped on for over a decade. UH had a chance to really build something and make a move to a major conference, they had a chance to matter. For some reason AD Rhoades decided to penny pinch at just the wrong time and now finds his program playing catch-up to TX St. & UT-SA.
Who would have believed this to be possible 5 years ago? Not me.
