Houston Football: Dana Holgorsen faces high expectations in 2019

Houston football is one of the top teams in the AAC and have their eyes on a conference title. Can D’Eriq King lead the Cougars to the top?

The football culture at Houston has completely changed over time as the Cougars have become accustomed to winning.

As of late, the AAC title game is always the goal for the Cougars and simply having a winning record and making it to a bowl game is not enough to keep your job as a head coach here. We saw this with Major Applewhite as he got let go after the 2018 season for going 15-10 in his two years as the head coach. There seems to be more to the firing than just the record alone, but that is for another issue for another day.

Houston has only had three losing seasons since 2003 when Art Briles took over. The Cougars have been fortunate to have some great football-minded coaches over the past few years (Briles, Kevin Sumlin, Tom Herman) and have ended up with four seasons of double-digit wins since 2003.

Let’s briefly put into perspective how the football culture changed.

From 1990-2002, the Cougars had only one season where they reached double-digit wins and only three seasons over .500. So they ended up with 10 losing seasons in that span, which is over three times the amount that they’ve had from 2003-18. So even with the dysfunctional season the Cougars just had in 2018, they still went 8-5 and don’t seem to be in danger of taking a step back with new head coach Dana Holgorsen coming in.

There are four teams that have a legit shot at the AAC title, those teams are Cincinnati, UCF, Memphis and Houston. Holgorsen should have the Cougars winning a high percentage of games and should keep them in contention for the AAC title with a shot at winning the whole conference.