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.
That’s precisely what happened on Saturday night. In the first quarter, the Cougar offense was clicking and it looked as if it would dominate the game. Then, in the second quarter, Rice’s defense made a couple of adjustments and began disrupting the timing of the UH offense, UH senior QB Kevin Kolb started looking like a freshman starting his first game, the Cougars dispensed with what had been an effective running game in the first quarter, the UH punting and kickoff return teams made several atrocious plays, the Owls hit a couple of big plays and presto, the Cougars found themselves down by 16 points. The Cougar booster club was not happy.
At least UH showed the moxie to turn things around enough to pull out the win. And there were certainly some bright spots for the Cougars — Rice’s offense got over 130 yards of their 280 total yards on two plays in the 2nd quarter, so the Houston defense shut down Rice for most of the game. Moreover, UH has a group of fleet receivers and an explosive running back in Roshawn Pope. But the bottom line on this first game is that either the Cougars took Rice lightly or the Cougar players are not much better than the Rice players. Either way, that does not bode well for the Cougars’ prospects over the remainder of the season.
By the way, former Rice athletic director Bobby May is probably not a popular man right now around the Rice football office. The Owls’ next three games are at UCLA, Texas at Reliant Stadium, and at Florida State. If the Owls can survive those games with a minimum of injuries, then my sense is that this plucky bunch can win a game or two in Graham’s initial season. Despite that dire forecast, based on what I saw Saturday night, the Owls appear to be moving in the right direction.
Texas Longhorns 56 North Texas 7
The Longhorns dispensed with one of three non-conference cupcakes on their 2006 schedule as perfectly-named Longhorn QB Colt McKoy had a smashing debut. However, a question for you: How does playing a team that has players that are not as good as Texas’ second team do any good in preparing the Horns for their next game against No. 1-rated Ohio State?
The Aggies easily won their first game by holding The Citadel to under 245 yards of total offense, but how does defending offenses such as those of The Citadel and the next three Aggie opponents — La-La (a/k/a Louisiana-Lafayette), Army and La Tech (Louisiana Tech) — prepare the Aggies for defending on September 30th the explosive offense of their nemesis of the past several seasons, the Texas Tech Red Raiders?