I’m not going to lie to you – I hated the Dana Holgorsen hire when Houston made it prior to the 2019 season. It felt to me like the easy answer. He had some success at West Virginia but often looked like a product less of his own ability and more of the timing that surrounded him.
He was a good air raid mind, that happened to coach in the Big 12 during the era when “running a pretty good air raid” was enough to win you eight or nine games if you had a capable quarterback.
Holgorsen had one, and so he won a decent chunk of games. It wasn’t a quarterback he actually recruited, nor was it one that he ever really developed (Will Grier absolutely should have been better than he ever was), but it was a quarterback nonetheless.
West Virginia was never an especially complete team under Holgorsen’s watch, fielding a pair of top 50 defenses in eight seasons in 2015 and 2016, neither of which coincided with an especially impressive offense.
His two best teams (2011 and 2016) went 10-3, both falling to unranked teams twice and coming up short of equaling their potential. West Virginia is the Big 12 is a unique and difficult job, but Holgorsen’s tenure always just felt like a knockoff of his former boss, Mike Gundy, in his time with Oklahoma State – never bad enough to fire, but never able to build a team capable of actually winning anything.
For Houston in the place it was in after the 2018 season, that just felt like a strange fit. The Cougars were looking to re-establish themselves as the program with the highest ceiling in the American Athletic Conference after Major Applewhite lowered it considerably with his own brand of good-but-never-great football.
Holgorsen… doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense for that. He’s a shitty recruiter, and he’s not exactly one of the sharper offensive minds anymore now that he’s in a league filled with offenses far more creative than his own – even as some of those programs, like UCF and Memphis, falter after their own shitty hires.
To make matters worse, upon his arrival, he attempted to pull the college football equivalent of tanking, redshirting a number of his more experienced players, in hopes of pairing them with a strong recruiting class and several impact transfers in 2020, while using 2019 as a season to establish new young talent.
The veterans, as any sane person would, thought this was deeply stupid and transferred elsewhere, leaving Holgorsen with an actual youth movement, rather than a simulated one, and Houston fell off a cliff. It was 4-8 in 2019 and 3-5 in 2020, though it was much worse than the record indicated.
The final mark against Holgorsen, and it’s a pretty big one, was the reasoning behind his hire, straight from the mouth of mega-donor and certified broke boy Tilman Fertitta, who told Dave Campbell’s Texas Football in 2019 that Houston hired Holgorsen at least in part because he wouldn’t leave, as successful coaches Art Briles, Kevin Sumlin and Tom Herman had.
“We wanted a coach who was not going to leave and Dana was the guy – a big-time coach that’s not going to leave,” Fertitta said. “Somebody who’s young comes in, wins nine or 10 games, they get hired again. It would have happened again.”
Coaches that don’t leave are coaches that can’t get a job elsewhere.
I’m not ready to say that I was wrong about that. Houston’s offense is still seriously lacking for creativity when compared to its conference mates. The roster is not as talented as it probably should be, and I think the Cougars are comfortable the third-best G5 team within their own state behind SMU and UTSA – not where this program should ever be with the recruiting ground it has.
But, I do have to give credit where it’s due. After a really bad start to the season, blowing a lead against Texas Tech, this Houston team has looked legitimately capable in its last four games, especially on defense.
Granted, the competition level within those four games is not high, but the Cougar defense has looked fantastic, and with only one truly strong opponent left on the schedule, we probably do need to start to talk about Houston as a potential AAC title game contender, especially because if it can beat SMU on Oct. 30, it would have one full game of insurance over the Mustangs, assuming they lose to Cincinnati (Houston does not play the Bearcats this regular season).
How did this happen?
Well, it comes back largely to talent, and Houston does actually have a decent amount of it on defense.
Defensive tackle Latrell Bankston was one of the nation’s better JUCO prospects in 2020 and began his career at Iowa State. Deontay Anderson, now a star linebacker, was a four-star safety who signed originally with Ole Miss. Nickel JoVanni Stewart was only a two-star but contributed at WVU before coming over with Holgorsen. Marcus Jones is a top-five cornerback in the entire country. Safety Gervarrius Owens transferred over from Kansas State. Outside of Stewart, every starter on the defense was at least a three-star prospect. There’s no Ed Oliver here, but it’s a really talented group for the AAC, and it plays like it.
That means a lot of this. Houston likes to rely on its front four to get pressure, with two underneath linebackers to cover against RPOs, while trusting the secondary with a lot of man coverage assignments. Here, No. 2 CB Damarion Williams draws the deep assignment and makes a play down the field.
That’s the core ideology here for the Houston defense, and it makes a lot of sense given DC Doug Belk’s background as both a cornerbacks coach and a Saban assistant. He trusts his defensive backs to make plays in man coverage, and his defensive linemen to do the same up front. The linebackers serve as a go-between, spying the quarterback and jumping up to deflect passes, while still reading the run first and the pass second.
Hence, plays like this. It’s an aggressive way to play, but if you’re confident in your players and you have a talent advantage, it can make for an extremely frustrating defense to play against. It translates into the zone stuff that Houston does too, though there’s not a whole lot of it.
This secondary plays really fast, because it has presumably been told to attack the ball with no concerns about what’s going on behind it. This is a group playing unencumbered football because it’s a group with very few rules beyond “cover the guy across from you” or “cover your spot and make plays.” This ideology is fading a bit from college football as offenses become more advanced, but within this league, with the talent Houston has, it seems to be making a comeback. Can it work against better offenses? Let’s see.