Cougars push for prominence
Program seeking to rise in the city’s sports hierarchy.
Houston deserves a Big Four.
Dallas has it. Even Denver does. But with the NHL still iced in the fourth-largest city in the country, the feeling remains that Houston continues to lack something huge in the heart of its big-time sports world.
The Texans, Rockets and Astros are everything. Summer can seriously drag here, though, and even talk radio runs out of topics to pick apart as June and July slowly roll over and the casual sports conversation slows to a crawl.
Imagining the Cougars filling the void is laughable in 2015. The University of Houston can’t fill its own football stadium, let alone carry the weight of a major athletics program in a city much more obsessed with the Aggies and Longhorns. But that doesn’t mean Hunter Yurachek can’t recognize the enviable opening staring the Cougars in the face.
“This is a city that is on the rise, and this is a university that is on the rise. ... We want to get to the same level from a wins and losses standpoint and a notoriety stand- point that our pro sports friends are having in this marketplace,” said Yurachek, UH’s vice president for intercollegiate athletics.
Convincing scattered alumni to show up for Tom Herman’s debut against boring Tennessee Tech at TDECU Stadium is one thing. Making the Cougars stand out in a region long devoted to the NFL, NBA and MLB is another battle entirely.
If Herman is juggling 50-pound barbells, Yurachek is lifting multiple mountains at once. Mack Rhoades’ replacement was as honest, upfront and direct as the Cougars’ splashy new football hire during a recent interview. Yurachek also didn’t shy away from the multitiered challenges the university faces at it attempts to build a collegiate program that deserves annual attention and devotion.
“We’ve got to increase our fan base,” Yurachek said. “We’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 University of Houston alums that live within an hour drive of this campus. Our season-ticket base for football is roughly about 14-15,000, and that’s not good enough.”
Trumped by A&M
The Cougars should have been the biggest game in town Saturday. The Texans are off this weekend, the Astros are still proving themselves to fans they lost, and the Rockets are silent. But Texas A&M soaked up college football’s kickoff, with a nationally televised matchup against No. 15 Arizona State at the Texans’ home stadium.
The Cougars’ uninspiring 2015 schedule takes another major hit when UH hosts SMU on Oct. 8, the same night the Texans tangle with the Colts in Thursday Night Football.
The one-step-forward, two-steps-sideways-andbackward approach has plagued the Cougars for decades.
“We’ve having to maybe accelerate a lot of culture change and just the shift in the ways that we think, because it didn’t happen around here gradually,” Herman said. “It was just kind of stuck in this mode for so long.”
Yurachek is countering the slide — three combined conference championships for football and men’s basketball in 25 years — by pairing Kelvin Sampson and Herman as coaching beacons while holding up their revitalized programs as flagships.
“If you turned on a TV last year and looked at a men’s basketball game at Hofheinz Pavilion, you may have seen 1,500 to 2,000 fans in an 8,000seat facility on a good night,” Yurachek said. “When you talk about the revenue that we’re leav- ing on the table by only drawing 2,000 fans for men’s basketball and the upper 20,000s in football, I mean, we’re leaving a lot of money.”
The Cougars are beginning to back their athletes financially. The construction of a football stadium has been followed by a state-of-the-art, $25 million basketball facility scheduled to open this fall. A $60 million renovation to Sampson’s basketball arena is on the books, and Yurachek also intends to build an indoor football practice.
Football program is a starting point
“It is atypical for a football program, especially at the Power 5 (conference) level, to share a weight room with 16 other sports,” said Yurachek, who said the university has a base of roughly 3,500 athletic donors contributing about $5 million a year.
Herman, who’s already made recruiting progress locally and regionally, is the starting point for everything big and new. The initial plan: Stack up football wins, build a crowd that wants to come back, capture the American Athletic Conference crown annually. Then, if a Power 5 conference comes calling, the Cougars will finally be big enough to deserve the citywide sports attention they yearn for.