EYES ON THE PRIZE
Tough foe kicks off Cougars’ chase for conference title, playoff spot
Houston coach Tom Herman says it’s another season, but some things remain the same. • “We’re the same disrespected, little American Conference team with a giant chip on their shoulder,” Herman said. • All that can change in a hurry. • A win over third-ranked Oklahoma in the season-opening Advocare Texas Kickoff on Saturday would validate the Cougars as contenders for the national title. • It would also be the first step to cracking the College Football Playoff code.
Follow the OU game by going undefeated in the American Athletic Conference and beat Louisville — another preseason Top 25 team — and UH would be in position to become the first school from the Group of Five to qualify for the fourteam playoff.
“It’s hard to make your schedule like it’s set up for us this year, almost impossible,” said Hunter Yurachek, UH’s vice president for intercollegiate athletics. “To say we want to play in the College Football Playoff, that’s going to be a challenge for us every year, any Group of Five member any year. This is really the perfect storm, the perfect scenario for a Group of Five team to put a dent in that armor per se this year with the way our schedule sets up.”
Herman, in his second season at UH, has been vocal about the strength of the AAC. Throw in a chance for the Cougars to deliver two statement wins in nonconference — and still be left out of the playoff — and Herman added, “then the system is broken” and “we need to go back to the drawing board.”
“If a team from the American Conference beats the No. 3 team in the country and then later in the year beats another Top 25 team and goes undefeated in conference and they don’t get in, then that’s a problem,” Herman said carefully without referencing his own team. “They need to blow it up and start over.”
Coming off a 13-1 season, UH is considered the best shot among the Group of Five — which includes the AAC, Conference USA, Mountain West, Mid-American and Sun Belt — to reach the CFP. No team from outside the Power Five has come close in the playoff ’s two years and mostly were on the outside looking in during the preceding Bowl Championship Series era.
UH is the only Group of Five team ranked in the preseason Associated Press and Amway Coaches polls.
“Let’s make no mistake, that’s a tall order,” AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said. “We are probably judged by a harsher standard (as a non-Power Five conference.) If we don’t go undefeated it’s very tough for us.”
Cracking the CFP code begins with scheduling tough teams. There is no margin for error, with even one loss too much to overcome.
And UH, or any Group of Five team, would need to be lucky along the way.
A year ago, Houston began the season 10-0 before its only slip-up, a 20-17 loss at Connecticut with star quarterback Greg Ward Jr. missing most of the game with a sprained ankle.
That loss meant the difference between going 12-1 and 13-0 in the regular season and requiring the CFP committee to give the Cougars a serious look. Houston finished the season with wins over four ranked opponents, including a 38-24 whipping of Florida State in the Peach Bowl.
“It would have been a very interesting conversation,” Herman said.
Herman said he favors playing a challenging nonconference schedule, particularly with the attention and the payout the Cougars are receiving for playing Oklahoma, but “it’s not something I’d want to do every year.”
“We want to challenge ourselves because quality wins obviously count as well,” Herman said. “But I think again in today’s day and age you have to be a little bit careful with challenging yourself too much and wearing yourself down and not being ready to go when conference (begins) because you’re busy playing a meat grinder of a non-conference schedule.”
The OU game represents arguably the biggest for the Cougars in school history.
A win would serve as a launching pad for potentially higher stakes, but Herman said the goal remains defending the AAC title.
“There’s not a ring, a trophy, there is nothing on the line,” Herman said of Saturday’s game. “This is an exhibition game for all intents and purposes.”
At the same time, UH is among a dozen expansion candidates being considered for the Big 12, in which OU is the defending champion.
Asked this week if the game is an audition, Herman said: “I’ve been told by the people in charge that it isn’t.”
Through it all, Herman has kept the Cougars focused.
Players are not allowed to use “we or “us” when referring to last year’s team.
“It’s always in the past, so I have not sensed an ounce of entitlement or any kind of arrogance from this team because they’ve had it beaten into them since January that they haven’t done anything yet,” Herman said. “There’s no reason for Oklahoma to respect them because anything that Oklahoma has seen of this program has to do with last year. So we have to go out and earn people’s respect.”
Some of those people are sitting in a room making decisions about the College Football Playoff.