Houston savors one shot at Texas
Old SWC rivals meet in Horns’ final year as a Big 12 member
HOUSTON — There are games on the University of Houston football schedule.
And then there’s the game. “Just beat Texas,” Dana Holgorsen, Houston’s fifth-year head coach, said of comments he’s received from supporters in advance of Saturday’s meeting against the eighth-ranked Longhorns at TDECU Stadium.
“Don’t care if you win any of them, but you’ve got to win that one. You can go 1-11 and it’s OK … if you beat Texas. Well, beating Texas is going to be hard. We know that.”
This is what happens when two schools — separated by about 160 miles — have not met on the football field in 21 years.
It’s been a mostly lopsided series, with the Longhorns owning a 16-7-2 edge, including the last seven wins. For its part, Houston has pulled off some big moments, including a 30-0 win in the Cougars’ first Southwest Conference season in 1976. It remains the last time Texas has been shut out in Austin. There was a 60-40 shootout win in the Astrodome in Jack Pardee’s first season in 1987 and a 49-7 win in Andre Ware’s Heisman Trophy season in 1989.
“It’s good for our fans,” Holgorsen continued. “It’s exciting for them. It’s way more exciting for them than it is for me.”
Bad blood has been present for decades. When the SWC disbanded, Houston, Rice, SMU and TCU were left to find new homes while Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor merged to form the Big 12. That sent the Cougars on a nearly three-decade journey outside of a major college conference, from Conference USA to the American Athletic Conference to, finally, joining the Big 12 this season.
There was the Bleacher Gate fiasco prior to the 2001 meeting when temporary bleachers erected at Robertson Stadium were deemed unsafe. Texas has not been back since.
Texas officials rejected an offer from Houston to play home-and-home football and men’s basketball series in exchange for a reduced buyout when Tom Herman left for the Longhorns in 2016.
In late August, Holgorsen delivered a salvo when he was asked at his weekly radio show about how the departures of A&M a decade ago and Texas’ move to the SEC in 2024 made the Big 12 “less desirable.”
‘Screw them,” Holgorsen responded. “They can go wherever they want. They don’t want us, and we don’t want them.”
Given another chance to respond Monday, Holgorsen said his comment was “more of a compliment to their programs than it was me sticking my nose in the air.”
“They really don’t want us. They never have,” Holgorsen said. “The facts are out there. They didn’t want Houston in the conference; the history of all this going back to the late 80s and early 90s, Houston was pretty good.”
Houston hasn’t played A&M in football since 1995, the final SWC season. The belief on Cullen Boulevard is Saturday’s game will be the only meeting against Texas for the foreseeable future.
“Quite frankly, if you ask me, ‘Do you want to play Texas and Oklahoma every year or not, I’d prefer not to,” said Holgorsen, whose team begins a home-andhome series with the Sooners next season. “Because those guys are really, really, really good and they are going to get better.”
In his last matchup against Texas in 2018, Holgorsen, then at West Virginia, boldly opted to go for the two-point conversion rather than force overtime in Austin.
“Hey, you want to win the game?” Holgorsen told his team. “Let’s (expletive) win the game.”
West Virginia won the game 42-41.
Five years later, Texas has experienced a mixed bag of results under Herman and current coach Steve Sarkisian, who is in his third season. At 5-1, the Longhorns have their best team in years and, despite a 34-30 loss to Oklahoma in the Red River Rivalry, are considered contenders for the Big 12 title and fourteam College Football Playoff.
“I’ve competed against these guys a lot over the years,” Holgorsen said. “They are in a different place now when I went there in 2018. Where they are now is different and where they are going to be a year from now, two years from now, is different. Where we are going to be one, two or three years from now is going to be different.”
Holgorsen’s message to Houston fans: Savor the moment. The game has already been announced as a sellout, marking the first time at 40,000-seat TDECU Stadium since an upset of third-ranked Louisville late in the 2016 season. The Cougars (3-3) are coming off their first Big 12 win, 4139 over West Virginia on a Hail Mary to end the game.
“We’re excited about it,” Holgorsen said. “You’re not a competitor if you don’t want this challenge. It’s going to be fun. They’re a good team.”
About being a threetouchdown underdog, Holgorsen added: “They’re heavy favorites and we have nothing to lose.”