Houston Cougar football coach Kevin Sumlin has a little request for the sold-out Robertson Stadium crowd on Saturday night. He wants you to turn the volume up to 11.
“As a team, as a staff, as players we appreciate all the support,” he said at yesterday’s media luncheon. “We would like for everyone to be as loud as humanly possible Saturday night. If anybody watched the game in Austin last Saturday, I think [Texas Tech] had a little problem early in the game with false start penalties due to the crowd and being able to communicate on the road. And this is my public plea for a little help from our fans. Maybe we can create a little more noise. We would appreciate it.”
The 17th-ranked Cougars attempt on Saturday night to continue their climb up the national rankings — and the national sports consciousness — when they take on the Texas Tech Red Raiders before a national audience on ESPN 2. And if, while watching the game, you should happen to think that both of these teams resemble each other when on offense, then don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Sumlin acknowledges that the two teams, both running the spread offense, might resemble each other, but “there is no one true spread offense,” he says. And Texas Tech head coach Mike Leach said in Monday’s Big 12 Teleconference that the Cougars are “very similar, and they do a lot of good things….[but] They’re into motion more than we are.”
The genesis of the offenses for both teams is the same as both Sumlin
and Leach were offensive coordinators under Oklahoma Sooners coach Bob
Stoops. And Sumlin’s offensive coordinator is Dana Holgorsen, who was a
co-offensive coordinator for Leach at Tech before joining Sumlin’s
staff. So the expectations are that this should be a high-scoring,
pass-filled game. But Sumlin and the players are worried about the Red
Raiders defense.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us
defensively,” Sumlin said. “Defensively, I think is one of the areas
where people are not talking about them. They had eight tackles for
loss against Texas. Texas did not score an offensive touchdown in the
first half….that’s pretty good defense.”
“Their defense is
really talented,” quarterback Case Keenum said. “I think they have a
plethora of talented players, and they play extremely hard. They’re
probably the best defense we’ve faced so far….They’re very sound.
They don’t make many miscues.”
But Sumlin doesn’t plan on making
any changes in the way the Cougars operate on offense. “We’re not good
enough to change things up week to week,” he said. “We’ve got enough
problems just trying to do what we do.”
That said, Sumlin and
his players are confident that if they play their game, if they play
the best they can play, then they can win. And if that should happen,
then the players will get to experience more of what they experienced
Monday morning, coming to the athletic facility to work out at six in
the morning to be greeted by a huge line of their fellow students
cheering them on as they stood in line for tickets to the game.
“I’m
a senior, and I’ve been here four years, and I’ve never seen that,”
linebacker Matt Nicholson said. “It’s great.” And senior center Carl
Barnett said “they were chanting and stuff and just doing what they do,
and it made us real proud of ourselves, and made us want to work harder
and do what we have to do.”
SOME MISCELLANEOUS COUGAR NOTES:
Kickoff
is currently set for 8:21 p.m. on Saturday, but ESPN has said that it
may hold the kickoff until 8:26. This will be a decision that ESPN
makes on Saturday night….Kevin Sumlin acknowledges how big this game
is for the city, the students, and the alumni, but to him, this is
still no more than one of the team’s 12 games. “This is great. And we
couldn’t be more excited about it,” he said. Sellout, the national
recognition, everything that makes everybody proud. For us, we can’t
be that high. We can’t be fans. We can’t be jumping up and down and
going nuts…we’ve got a whole long season to go.”…The game will be
handled by a Big 12 officiating crew….Want to know one of the best
things about the team’s success? According to center Carl Barnett it is
the fact that the students on campus are actually wearing UH clothes
instead of gear from Texas A&M and Texas Tech.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.
