Wednesday, November 18, 2020 | 7 ANDY YANEZ, EDITOR
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Building an AAC, national contender ‘doesn’t happen overnight,’ Dana Holgorsen says
UH head coach Dana Holgorsen encourages his team pregame before its game against UCF at TDECU Stadium during the 2020 season. Despite suffering three defeats during the campaign, Houston has lost to two ranked opponents and to UCF, which is one of the best teams in the AAC. Houston is looking to reach that level of success with Holgorsen at the helm. | Courtesy of UH athletics
ANDY YANEZ
SPORTS EDITOR @AYANEZ_5
Inside of UH head coach Dana Holgorsen’s office is a board that tells him the number of spots that the team needs to focus on during the recruitment class for the upcoming season. So far this season, he has 25 spots on his board and only 10 names that will join UH in either January or June. “Nobody wants to hear this because everyone wants quick fixes and they want to be great now,” Holgorsen told reporters during his weekly Zoom news conference after Houston’s loss to Cincinnati. “I’m here to build it the right way for over the course of as much time that they allow me to be able to do it.” After suffering the beating at
the hands of No. 6 Cincinnati, the head coach acknowledged that Houston still had ways to go before it could compete with the top teams in the American Athletic Conference. UH had just lost its second straight game against a well-established AAC team. Holgorsen listed off the three opponents that Houston has lost to this season in BYU, Cincinnati and UCF, and he said that those programs all had one thing in common: their respective head coaches are multiple years into being at the helm. Head coach Luke Fickell with the Bearcats and Kalani Sitake with BYU both took over their programs in 2016. Josh Heupel with the Knights gained control in 2018. For Holgorsen, who joined
Houston in January 2019, having that time is what is needed to build a program into one of the few contenders in the NCAA, and it is what he hopes he can do at the University. “Getting things the right way doesn’t happen overnight,” the UH coach said. “I apologize for that, our fans deserve wins. Our administration demands wins, and that’s going to happen.” Despite the emphasis on the future, Holgorsen is not abandoning the 2020 season either. Houston’s players are still invested in getting as many wins as it can, and they showed it to the coaching staff during their practices leading up to USF. “I liked our energy,” Holgorsen said. “Our guys understand where we are at. They know that we didn’t meet the challenge of
a top 10 football team and went out there and practiced hard.” While the Cougars appear to have been snake-bit for the second year in a row with injuries to players like senior receiver Marquez Stevenson, senior defensive lineman Payton Turner and junior linebacker Donavan Mutin, who are all going through different things. Although their inability to suit up has left voids for UH, it has also provided an opportunity to see what the team has in the younger talent. “There are some areas where I see future and I see hope,” said Holgorsen, who kept a group of 30-40 developing players after practice leading up to the South Florida game. “There are areas where I don’t, and you address that with recruiting.”
Some of the positions that Holgorsen has said in the past he is emphasizing are on the offensive line, which has had its struggles in 2020, both in terms of production and depth. During his weekly radio show the Thursday before the game against the Bearcats, Holgorsen said he had set aside 18 different scholarships for that position. Despite the sobering reminder against Cincinnati, Holgorsen is confident that he has seen improvement from his first season at UH, and he expects that continue. “We’re better now than we were a year ago, and a year from now we will be a lot better than we are right now,” Holgorsen said. sports@thedailycougar.com
