Holgorsen gets his first look at Cougars
The University of Houston’s football renovation under coach Dana Holgorsen involves dirt and grass as well as personnel and tactics, which is why the Cougars staged Tuesday’s first day of spring practice, on a cool, sunny, windy day, inside their $20 million indoor practice facility.
Holgorsen said one of the two outdoor grass practice fields is being reconstructed this spring and won’t be available until the summer, so the Cougars will be spending more time indoors than he would like over the next month.
“I’m not happy about it,” he said. “We’ve got one good (outdoor) field and one bad field, so I’ve got more room in here than I do out there.
“There’s 100 yards out there that I can’t use right now, and if I don’t use it now I can get it this summer. So the compromise is to come here in the spring.”
Holgorsen was impressed with the indoor center, which was a pie-in-the-sky dream when he was at UH as an assistant coach in 2008-09, but he’s looking forward to getting outdoors as much as he can.
“I don’t care if it’s 110 (degrees). There’s going to be times we go outside, just like in West Virginia (his previous stop as head coach), even if it was 28 degrees we were going to go outside. This is a wonderful facility … (and) those two practice fields out here are pretty dadgummed good, and I’m going to want to use them a lot this summer.”
Holgorsen said Tuesday’s practice involved teaching and basic drills. Players will don pads Saturday, he said, “and then kind of get after it the second week” of practice.
He reiterated his decision to keep D’Eriq King off limits from contact drills this spring even though the quarterback has been fully cleared to participate in the wake of a knee injury suffered late last season.
As for the relatively late practice start, Holgorsen said he wanted to do that to give players more offseason time to digest a new offense and a new four-man front on defense.
“We can teach some in the offseason and go slow and hopefully five weeks from now we’ve got a better understanding of what we’ve got,” he said.
He said the transition since he was hired to replace the ousted Major Applewhite “went over pretty smooth, and we’re at a point where I feel good about the staff and good about the team, and now we want to go to work.”
Also Tuesday, Holgorsen said senior offensive lineman Kameron Eloph’s career has ended because of medical issues. Eloph will remain on scholarship, but his loss increases the need to bolster depth on the line during spring drills and preseason training camp.
Meanwhile, Sports Business Daily reported Tuesday the American Athletic Conference has reached an agreement with ESPN that will pay the league about a billion dollars over 12 years beginning in 2020-21. That will average about $83.3 million per year or $6.94 million per school, an increase of about $5 million per school per year, the publication reported.
SBD also reported AAC schools did not sign a grant of rights, which would have restricted members from jumping to a larger conference.
A spokesman for the league declined to comment on the report, and UH athletic director Chris Pezman also declined to comment.