The Labor Day weekend marks the beginning of the football season and HCT’s weekly local football reviews, so here’s the first weekly review of the 2006 season:
Houston 31 Rice 30
The only real game of the weekend occurred at Rice Stadium on Saturday night as the Cougars pulled one out that they should not have won against the feisty Owls playing their first game under new head coach Todd Graham. The Coogs looked to be preparing for a blowout by taking a 14-0 lead in the first quarter, but then the Ows scored 30 straight points behind clever QB Chase Clement over the next quarter and a half to take a 16 point lead, only to have UH score the final 17 points of the game to nab the victory.
Despite the win, Cougar supporters were not thrilled. The Cougars under head coach Art Briles frequently engage in an untraditional, discombobulated sort of game that leaves UH supporters scratching their heads. Briles runs an unconventional offense — sort of a combination of the Wing-T, Single Wing, Run ‘N Shoot, and Spread offenses, if you can imagine that — which, when it is clicking, is very difficult to defense. Unfortunately, the offense is also based largely on timing and, when a defense figures out how to disrupt that timing, the UH offense struggles. And when Houston’s offense stuggles, it tends to affect the other components of the UH football team.