Coming off of Week 1 of college football, I had resigned myself to a Cougar football season full of pain. I have been referring to UH as a basketball school for the past couple of years. But this year feels like a reckoning for the stench of failure that came from the Holgorsen era. Even though I am a believer in Willie Fritz, I had just come to understand that this year would be a passive college football-watching experience as I rely fully on a hope for the future program. There was even a thought in my mind that this year will be another losing-to-Rice year.
Note: For non-UH readers, a loss to Rice is the worst form of loss. Unlike a UT loss to OU or an Ohio State loss to Michigan, a loss to Rice is humiliating. As the oldest rival for UH at this point, losing to a school of coked-up, trust fund nerds is the worst kind of loss. When they lose, the school populace still has better job prospects and earning potential and social climbing ability. When they win, Rice has beaten UH in the one thing we can hang over their heads – athletics.1
Even though part of me thinks there is an argument for UNLV being ranked, I think my week 1 reaction may have been a little dramatic. I’d like to offer my wholehearted bad to coach Willie Fritz and mostly everyone else. I still think my Donovan Smith analysis is correct (he is just not good enough). Especially given that I do not think he is able to throw down the field. At the same time, I fully believe he has ascended to a higher plane of understanding where stats don’t matter. A true player.
With that said, a combination of UH’s defense and OU’s new QB just not fitting the system yet created an image that UH could actually slay a giant. Listen, OU has not been good this season. It’s impossible to convert on third down when you consistently can’t get anything done on first and second down. But, to paraphrase something my mother once said, UH came across as a good football time. Maybe it was my incredibly limited expectations. Maybe it was the fact OU is still an impregnable footballing force, even if they haven’t backed that up in years. Overall, I was wholly surprised.
As with most things, the thing that really killed me during the game was the hope. I was expecting it to be 72-0 by the second quarter, where the wagon horses get a go or two carrying the ball. There is a joke here about both getting penalized for a horsecollar, but realistically the lack of opposable thumbs would probably lead to many late hits.
Sometimes the victory is not in the victory. Sometimes the victory is in the stateline at the end of the game. To me, this was a victory. I came away from the game with a slight golf clap. There was a valiant effort and fight in the face of a Sooner (still no clue what that is) behemoth. On a day of giants (or very old churches) falling to schools from worse football conferences, NIU had given me the slightest glimpse into what actual victory could look like. A fairytale beginning if you don’t count Week 1.
There is a reason fairytales get dark and gritty ABC remakes now.
Despite the fact that UH ended up losing the game, I am nothing but inspired. Sure, I still expect a season of woe from a team hodgepodge together by late transfers, but at least this was a moral victory. If anything, this was a loss for OU and a win for UH. How do you, the #15 ranked team in the country, barely squeak out a victory against one of the worst Big 12 teams? Paul Finebaum threw a fit seeing an SEC team have to get a safety (questionable as it was) to end the hopes of a Big 12 team.
This is all to say, I see some glimpse of hope in a team I had none in. It’s like A New Hope, except the writing is less realistic and no one has to deal with a newly-famous coked-up Harrison Ford (there is a Dana joke in here somewhere). Offensively there is a ton to be desired, but that will have to be addressed in the offseason, because like my fantasy team, UH is locked into mediocrity. I still think this was a win. This is a Quad 1 loss, which will help our chances when the playoff committee announces their first picks November 5th, 2024 – the most important thing on television that night.
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- My high school won the Academic Decathlon something like 11 years in a row, while not having a winning football team in that timeframe. Losing to my high school meant your program was in a very sorry state. That is the same with Rice. ↩︎
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