You want to say he under achieved because he didn’t duplicate in 7 years what Hall of Fame coach Lewis did over 30 seasons and I want to say he didn’t under achieve because he did more in 7 seasons than the next 6 coaches did over 23 seasons. Who is the one being unreasonable here?
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There is a difference between coaching at Lamar and coaching at Houston.
At the time, Lamar was in the Southland conference, a mid-major conference at best. Houston was playing the SWC which was a major conference. The Southland conference was a 1-bid league, the SWC was a multi-bid league.
The question comes down to expectations. Lamar made post season tournaments, which for someone in the Southland, is exceedng expectations. Now he moves to Houston, a school that recently has appeared in three final fours. Expectations are going to be higher, you are not only expected to make post-season tournaments, you’re supposed to WIN games in them. Add to that, the competition is going to be tougher, an off night in SWC might have meant playing TCU, TCU would probably have beaten most of the schools in the Southland. Recruiting is going to be tougher because you’re going up against the big schools.
We expected Foster to exceed expectations at Houston like he did at Lamar. While at Lamar that meant making tournaments, at Houston he made tournaments, but too often the wrong one and he didn’t win once he got in them. That was not exceeding expectations.
Completely missing the point. Expectations may have been higher than what Pat Foster achieved but the next 25 years proved comparing Foster’s success or lack thereof based on a 3 year window of Houston basketball and ignoring the two years after that window and eight years before that window was wrong. The argument being Foster’s team had deservingly crappy support because of a “poor performance” based on the best of his 7 years not matching the best of Lewis’ 30 years.
Guy might not have seen the 80s as UH head coach had not Harry Fouke been the AD. In the spring of 1980 I was at lunch with a big-time UH booster and Harry’s successor. Let’s just say that the basketball program was under some serious evaluation. It was critical to have signed Rob Williams
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There is no way we should have lost to UCSB.
And the year we lost to GT we should have been much better than we were…
I still remember that Stanford game where Adam Keefe took Alvaro Tehran to the woodshed.
Foster always talked about running up tempo but ran a lot of zone and didn’t seem comfortable letting the guys run.
I have not seen anyone say that Foster deserved crappy support. I have said you can’t blame the fans for his failure to win in the post season which resulted in him getting forced out.
Also just because UH blew the hires after Foster does not mean Foster shouldn’t have been forced out. It meant that UH should have hired better.
But the leadership was horrible at the time…so you get what your leadership is. We didn’t have anyone close to Dr. KHATOR then…
That was a bad matchup for us against Georgia Tech; they just had too much height in that game. Got screwed a bit by the seed we ended up getting. But, I agree that we should have better in season. That teams was very talented.
UH hosted NIT gm in 1988 – beat Fordham, you said so yourself. Then you say Houston was 0-3 in hosting under Foster. I think you were on roll w attendance narrative so you forgot the one yr they got lucky and hosted 
. #AttendanceAttendanceAttendance 
The tournament also didn’t have 64 teams playing most of Coaches games. The number of teams fluctuated between 22 and 25 between 1953 and 1974. In 1975, the tournament allowed 32 teams to enter, so that teams that did not win their conference could be chosen as at-large bids. It wasn’t until 1985 the number of teams playing in the tournament went to 64 which is the current number.
Got the 1st part from this site: http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring07/harkins/history.html
Also some people seam to forget what Coach did. Here’s his resume, Lewis led the Houston Cougars program to 27 straight winning seasons, 14 seasons with 20 or more wins, and 14 trips to the NCAA Tournament. His Houston teams advanced to the Final Four on five occasions (1967, 1968, 1982, 1983, 1984) and twice advanced to the NCAA Championship Game (1983, 1984). His selections to the Tournament were harder to receive than his predecessors, 32 to 64 teams. His NCAA record I believe is 26 wins and losing 22 for a winning % of .541. I could be a little off but not much. No matter how well Coach Foster did not winning in the postseason leaves him a little short at rallying the troops. The bar no doubt at that time was extremely high and it’s not like UH didn’t give him a chance. He definitely wasn’t a loser, but like as has been said he was following a Legend and he didn’t win postseason games.
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Corrected it but the gist was still the same, we were 0-3 in the games we didn’t host and Houston hosting 1 out of 4 while Lamar under the same coach hosted 3 out of 6 is still a big difference in my opinion.
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I had to look hard to find something bad/wrong w all the good info you provided. Plus you know I like to give you hard time w attendance stuff, glad you don’t take it personally. I like to keep it light at times instead of all the barking on here about everybody out to get UH Coogs!
Reason’s to not knock Foster…
Alvin Brooks (Foster partly to blame as he brought him to UH)
Clyde Drexler
Ray Mc Callum
James Dickey
Nuff said !!
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No you still knock Foster, but you take a bat to the admin who hired those other coaches …
Oh look, we’ve turned an honor for Carl Herrera into a thread arguing about which coaches sucked and why. 
That 89-90 squad was fun - lots of size, athleticism, and pretty good outside shooting. We had a couple of weird losses that year, and that UCSB game was one of them - that team got lost in the bright lights of the tournament, imo.
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Agree, the UH administration was virtually non-existent toward athletics during those times…except for Dickey.
Renu’s boy Rhodes did that one !!
Rhodes and his hire Yurachek were on a par with those past administrators. Of course, I think Rhodes was only brought in to get the stadium done, as that seemed to be his only accomplishment at Akron
What a lost 20 years will do !.
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Mack was not perfect but he got a heck of a lot done during his time and with his fingerprints. He also did a fabulous job on the stadium.