The Houston area’s entertaining football season kicked off with high school and NFL pre-season football over the past couple of weeks. But the season really takes flight this weekend as the University of Houston hosts UCLA at Robertson Stadium. And for a variety of reasons, that game will be among the most interesting of the first weekend of the 2011 college football season.

The return of exceptional UH QB Case Keenum for his sixth (!) season is one of the obvious storylines. But an even more interesting one is whether UH head coach Kevin Sumlin will be able to steer the Cougars to a key win over a BCS conference opponent in what is his most important season of his 23 year college coaching career.

Last October, as UH’s football season hung in the balance after Keenum was knocked out for the year, this blog post noted that how the Cougars finished the season would go a long way toward defining the direction of Sumlin’s head coaching career.

Unfortunately, the finish wasn’t what Sumlin wanted. After wins over SMU and Memphis had the Coogs entering November 5-3, UH finished the season 0-4, albeit against good teams (UCF, Tulsa, Southern Miss and Texas Tech).

But add to that disappointing finish the fact that Sumlin’s Coogs lost to Rice for the second time in Sumlin’s three seasons at UH and legitimate questions arise over whether Sumlin has what it takes to build a consistent winner on Cullen Avenue.

There is no question that Sumlin can coach offense. Even after losing Keenum last season, the Cougars ended the year fifth in the Football Bowl Subdivision (“FBS”) in passing, 11th in total offense and 13th in scoring. Not what it would have been had Keenum been at the controls all season, but not bad considering that a true freshman QB (David Piland) was under center after Keenum and his backup (Chase Turner) went down in the UCLA game.

However, no one knows at this point whether Sumlin can piece together a decent – much less a good – defense. Sumlin fired defensive coordinator John Skladany after his second season and brought in Brian Stewart last season to implement a 3-4 scheme. The result? Stewart’s defense was far worse than either of Skladany’s two defenses as DC, finishing 110th among the 120 FBS teams.

So, incongruously, the offensive-minded Sumlin’s coaching career is largely dependent upon whether he can turnaround his team’s defensive performance.  Indeed, if Keenum stays healthy all season, the defensive improvement doesn’t need to be all that much – Houston’s explosive offense will cover up many warts on the defensive side.

But until the Cougars’ defense can show that it can stop even a hard-chargin’ marching band – something that Houston’s defenses haven’t been able to do consistently since Jack Pardee’s coaching stint over 20 years ago – Sumlin’s promising coaching career (as well as Houston’s BCS conference aspirations) will remain firmly planted in the second tier of big-time college football.