The Pecan Park Eagle

Ole buttermilk sky,
I’ma keepin’ my eye peeled on you,
What’s the good word tonight?
Are you gonna be mellow tonight?
~ Hoagy Carmichael

With only the spiritual memory of songwriter Hoagy Carmichael to guide us, a beautiful buttermilk sky showed up at dusk prior to the UH Cougar football debut of Tom Herman on Saturday, September 5, 2015 at TDECU Stadium in Houston for the game our big cats had scheduled as the season opener against the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles of Coach Watson Brown.

The weather was hot and humid, but everything else bore the bouquet of what passes for autumn in Houston. The UH band played strong. The Cougar fans decked out in red jerseys. And the breezy wind that whispered in after dark teased us for a second with the idea that it was being pushed into motion by the cooler, oncoming dry breath of our first early “norther” of the new season.

It didn’t happen, but it combined with everything else to whet our appetites for what is sure to come – and in the way we just described, Warm air stirring. Then cool air prevailing. It may not happen until October, but it will happen. And Houston will have survived another summer and traded it for a fall, winter and spring run of weather that is not quite as hot, not quite as often, and even downright freezing cold, wet, and even icy, at times.

As a UH undergraduate, personally, I cannot, even now, this late in the game, get anywhere near the UH main campus without feeling the same bond with the university that has existed for me since my freshman year first semester in the fall of 1956. Oh, I’ve added many other attachments to my personal identity trellis since my graduation in 1960, but UH always will be the place that was my earlier neighborhood kid mentor about “possibility” through the academic and campus social culture where I eventually found my first usable walking legs into the larger adult world.

Welcome to our town – and our University of Houston Cougar Football program, Coach Tom Herman! Your resume arrived here on the wings of your success last season as the offensive coordinator for the 2014 National Champion Ohio State Buckeyes. And that reputation wasn’t hurt at all by this past Saturday’s 52-24 victory over Tennessee Tech, even though they are regarded as a lesser level foe.

Many of the top NCAA Division 1 schools play “lesser rated” competition in their home debuts each year. But as you already have grasped, since the demise of our membership in the old Southwest Conference after 1996, UH has been on a steady roll toward playing almost all of their annual schedules against teams from the Athletics Anonymous conferences of college football – and, far too often, even having trouble playing .500 winning percentage football at times.

That wasn’t always true. The Cougars came of age with the big boys in this game, starting in 1962, with the coming of Coach Bill Yeoman to the UH football helm. Five years into his long-term in 1967, and in the early period of his veer offense bonanza, the Cougars went to East Lansing, Michigan and totally destroyed the Michigan State Spartans by the landslide score of 37-7. UH immediately vaulted to No. 3 in the polls the following week. For the next decade, UH was beating teams like Miami and Florida State with some regularity. And, by 1976, the Cougars entered the SWC as the official recognition of their status as a “big time college football” program. The Coogs even celebrated that season by going to Austin and beating Texas, 30-0, on their way to winning the conference championship and the Cotton Bowl against Maryland –  and all in their very first season in the venerable old league. They followed that success by winning or tying for the SWC crown in three of their first four seasons, and then going to the Cotton Bowl each time.

“3 Out of 4 Ain’t Bad” became the Cougar tee-shirt banner after their great 1979 third SWC crown and thrilling victory over Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl on January 1, 1980. The problem was, UH’s incredible early SWC success seemed to upset some of the older powerhouses of the league. We didn’t realize it at the time, but that upstart heavy foot on the “win, baby, win” pedal would find the Cougars left alone in the college football ocean, searching for driftwood program survival support, once the SWC fell apart after 1996 and four of the member schools (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor) simply shifted to the old Big Eight Conference to form the new Big 12 conference in 1997.

We agree with and support your fervor for getting the City of Houston behind the University of Houston Cougars as this city’s college team, but we also recognize that the job cannot be done on the backs of Longhorn, Aggie, Rice and Baylor alumni. We have to find a way to get real about those 160,000 UH alums who apparently live in our area, but who do little, if anything to support any part of the university’s academic, artistic, scientific, or athletic programs. – The question we need to learn more about is – what, if anything, did these UH graduates bond with as important to them while they were students. My guess is that many simply saw UH as a “means to an end” solution to their individual older student degree plan goals and that these students felt little to nothing of a bond to the school as their “alma mater”.

I simply refuse to believe that first degree-crank conclusion is the whole story for all – or even most of those UH grads. The university has been evolving for years. It has not just been a practical option for older students for at least twenty to thirty years, or whenever it was the push to attract more campus resident and international students began. In fact, the current face of the student body is quite a cross-section of the world, with much support  from Asian and Indian students showing up this past Saturday in full red battle gear. I simply think that UH has not been doing much to connect recent students to the idea of connecting and staying involved with UH beyond graduation. All of those factors are key when it comes to reaching out to the uninvolved alums. They are not all the same person. And that point needs to be strongly examined before initiating any kind of “one size fits all” outreach program.

In closing, Mr. Herman, we hope you will be with us for a while. We were spoiled by Mr. Yeoman’s 26-year tenure (1962-86). When he retired, we thought we were closing the door on the “Yeoman Era”. As it turned out, we soon enough learned that we do not have eras at UH. Bill Yeoman was our “old school” exception to all others. Since his time, we have “bad coach hires” that can last forever, if that’s all you want. Or we can have “good coach” hires that last for only as long as it takes a larger, richer school to come along and scoop up our guy with a lot more money, status, and luxury perks.

Bill Yeoman and UH were about loyalty and mutual commitment. We of UH are hoping in this newer “era” of the “good coach money and ego abductions” that we may be able to gradiently pay you enough along the way to merit your loyalty and commitment to our humble, but achievable aims, for as long as possible.

Happy Labor Day, Everybody!

____________________

Babe McCurdy
Mad Dog Defense Mascot
University of Houston Cougars
1979-1980

This entry was posted on September 7, 2015 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.