Cougars’ takeover expands beyond H-Town
The No. 6 team in America lives in our backyard.
Just outside downtown Houston, to be exact.
Tom Herman, the greatest salesman in college football, no longer has to sell anything when it comes to the national legitimacy of his Cougars.
Beating the heck out of Oklahoma last weekend and Florida State in last year’s Peach Bowl took care of that. Receiving 1,243 points in Tuesday’s new Associated Press Top 25 poll — just 18 points behind No. 5 Michigan and attention-starved Jim Harbaugh — put the finishing touch on an H-Town Takeover that now stretches from coast to coast.
Keep saying it to feel the power of how good it sounds:
The Cougars are the sixth-best team in the USA. Herman’s next to national powerhouses Alabama, Clemson, FSU, Ohio State and Michigan.
It’s never been a better time to be a UH football believer.
National magazine covers and exclusive behindthe-scenes stories. Nightly ESPN coverage and local talk-radio stations finally realizing it’s OK to discuss local college football on the airwaves when not worrying who’s going to back up Xavier Su’a-Filo on Sunday.
But as hot as UH has been in recent months, seeing the Cougars almost
crack the top five of a palace normally reserved for Power Fives and legacy schools marked a highwater mark in Herman’s rise.
What was once a tiny startup company near TDECU Stadium now has a billionaire investor. Seeing the Cougars all the way up at No. 6 is the peak of UH football mania.
“It’s an exciting day for the University of Houston, and (Tuesday’s) rankings are the reflection of all the hard work our football program has put in over the offseason,” vice president for athletics Hunter Yurachek said. “Coach Herman pushes our players to compete for championships, and the rankings are a byproduct of it.”
A coach who 18 months ago was begging students to check out the new thing on Cullen Boulevard now has Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney and Urban Meyer in his sights.
The rest of this football-mad state isn’t far behind.
One giant leap for Longhorns
Thanks to pulling off one of the most thrilling victories in Austin since Vince Young went pro, Charlie Strong’s Texas Longhorns are suddenly No. 11 in the country.
It’s too high after just one game for a 1-0 UT team that was a pitiful 5-7 last year and still must prove its turnaround is for real in 2016. But Strong’s epic survival versus former No. 10 Notre Dame on Sunday night — 50-47 in double overtime, with Royal-Memorial Stadium becoming a coach-surfing mosh pit after Tyrone Swoopes drove an 18-wheeler across the Fighting Irish’s frightened face — was easily worth a top-20 push. And who am I to deny the burnt orange faithful a one-week overreaction after six years of striving for mediocrity?
TCU’s No. 15. Kevin Sumlin’s at 20 after Texas A&M remembered how to win a big one at Kyle Field and downed UCLA in OT. Art Briles’ old school remained at No. 23, thanks to Baylor’s rout of poor little Northwestern State.
Notice a trend? That’s a whopping five Texas schools in the top 25.
It hasn’t been this good in our football paradise since September 1957, when the AP ranked only 20 teams and six were from this state — A&M (2), Baylor (11), Texas (13), Houston (14), SMU (15), Rice (18).
The Mustangs haven’t been ranked since the mid-1980s, and the Owls were bludgeoned 46-14 by Western Kentucky last week, which shows how much things have changed since Dwight Eisenhower was president. Texas is good at football again. TCU is better than the Aggies.
A Strong squad almost scored as many points as Briles’ ex-team.
An American Athletic Conference university (at least for now) is ranked higher than everyone else in Texas.
UH seeking sellouts
Now comes the hard part for UH: selling out its own stadium.
Of course, playing Lamar on Saturday doesn’t help. Neither does trying to fake excitement at seeing Tulane and Tulsa on the Cougars’ 2016 home schedule.
But as of Tuesday night, tickets still were available for UH’s first game at TDECU. And if the No. 6 team in America — which might soon be a proud new member of the Big 12 — can’t find 40,000 Houstonians to fill up a field just eight miles from the Texans’ always-sold-out 72,220-seat home, it will be time to rethink the local drawing power of Herman’s takeover.
But right now, UH is on top of almost everyone in the country, and that’s all there is to say.
The Cougars haven’t been this high since 1990 when they climbed to No. 3.
It’s one heck of a second-week poll for this state after an opening weekend we’ll be talking about the rest of this year.
It’s the Cougars, Longhorns, Horned Frogs, Aggies and Bears dominating our sports lives — at least until the Texans return to life.
brian.smith@chron.com twitter.com/chronbriansmith