A great read. Thanks.
Great post!
I remember the Tangerine Bowl.We were on TV. It might not have seemed much in the grand scheme of things but to us “true believers” we saw it as a start.
We had a stocky, hard to tackle, running back, Joe Lopasky, who would turn out to be the keystone of a string of great U of H running backs.
Also back then they had less bowl games and tv so all those bowls games really meant more than today.
Man was a FB genuis, GREAT X’s,and O 's. Coach Could recruit great talent. Loved UH. That what we need now.
Fortunately the UH brain trust didn’t fire Yeoman the years following the bowl win because he won only 8 games in the next three years.
The times were so bad that the student body was hanging effigies of Yeoman and Fouke on campus. A very different time.
Imagine him being fired from UH and developing the Veer with his next team. Thank goodness that didn’t happen.
Sometimes inspiration is birthed out of desperation or perhaps it was just dumb luck, but the Veer offense was developed and the rest is history. The Veer changed the trajectory of UH football from that day forward.
The Run’n Shoot offense was adopted many years later. It also gave UH football a much needed shot in the arm until Helton trashed it. Had Helton kept the offense, tweaked it and focused on developing a kick arse defense we can only imagine where we would have been today.
The moral of this post is UH niche is innovation and finding coaches who embrace innovation is the path we need to follow.
Conventional offense is not our niche. It failed during the formative years of UH football. It clearly failed under Helton. It’s failing now.
CDH has been a creative offensive mind, like Yeoman during the 3 year period prior to developing the Veer, CDH might be at the point where he is a desperate or dumb luck moment away from turning the program around, and if not then we should turn our attention to finding the next innovative mind among the coaching community to move us forward.
Innovation is the genie that has been and will continue to be our genie in the bottle.
Anybody notice what Georgia is doing on offense now? Kind of harem scarem but it is working.
Man, this sounds familiar:
“After such an impressive start to the Yeoman Era, hopes were understandably high for the future of UH football. But three consecutive losing seasons with a combined record of eight wins, 19 losses and two ties had a growing contingent of alums and fans calling for the firing of the coach.”