The Original Rebuild..How it Happened

Cougar Football
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During 1963, 1964, and first half of 1965 Bill Yeoman was 4-19-1.

He suffered 5 shutouts.

A home game in Rice Stadium drew 5,000.

His defense was good to really good during that time. His Offense was pitiful to non-existent.

It turned in game 6 of the 1965 season when we beat Ole Miss. The Offense scored only 17, but our defense held The Rebels to only 3.

From that point forward we had our greatest era of Cougar Football. 1966-1984.

Yeoman’s Offense ran the football, then delivered knockout punches via the passing game. We had WR’s wide open due to opponents having to focus on defending the run,
In 1966 our RB stable included Dickie Post, Warren McVea, and Paul Gipson. Yet QB Bo Burris lead the Nation in TD passes. Our Receivers routinely were wide open. Yep, even Donavan Smith could have hit them. Wide open.

Essentially Coach Fritz is using this same formula. He already, in year one, has put a solid Defense on the field. And he is committed to running the football. Just like Yeoman.

What Fritz lacks is what Yeoman originally lacked…solid OL and Bo Burris. It took 4 recruiting classes to finally get all the pieces in place.It also will take Fritz several classes to get there.

We appear to be solid at QB for 2025. McMickle comes back from injury and our High School,phenom hits the roster. Both are very young, but appear to be upgrades at QB.

Regardless of who we have as Head Coach only stellar recruiting will solve our woes. That is true anywhere. Watch any games yesterday? I saw talent on many,many,many teams that we can merely drool over.

By the way Yeoman called his own plays. Since our OC is under-performing Fritz might assign him different duties and then let his contract expire. Let Fritz call the plays. Couldn’t be worse, and might be better.

Lastly our OL Coach is suspect. I know he used to be with Fritz at Tulane and that he once coached High School football in Houston. Still we are seeing no OL improvement in 2023 or 2024. Dana actually hired him last year. Maybe he will get better. So far he is not.
Yeoman’s OL Coach was called “Coach Malice “ and there was a reason for that.

After Fritz signs his 2025 class, including transfers, we will know what to expect. Stellar QB and OL recruits will turn this around. And little else will.

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The problem with trying to draw on that history is that we won’t retain players for several years, so they can’t be developed in the same way.

Plus, the offense we’re seeing bears no resemblance to the innovative veer in its early days. It’s essentially the same offense we saw last year, only several magnitudes worse. If Fritz has a unique scheme that’s going to change college football, he’s done a great job of hiding it.

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The truth in this hurts lol

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Fritz has won everywhere he’s been. That’s really hard to do. Building a program takes time. He’ll get it done. It just won’t be as painless as some of us had hoped. As for the rest of this year, I’d like to see something resembling a reasonable offense by the end of the year.

The defense is great. I hope they can keep playing hard.

I believe in CWF.

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It’s just not that easy to build a team anymore those days maybe over with all the transfers in and out CFB is a big mess

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Good history of the era, I was there. You left out one thing, the veer offense which was new, so new that the rest of the country was calling it the Houston triple option. Since we were the only one running it defenses were not practicing against it and initially didn’t have any answer for it.

Fritz doesn’t have a new offense to spring on the football world, so I wouldn’t expect that kind of turnaround.

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The history is fun but everybody forgets a lot of Yeoman’s success corresponded with us moving in to the brand new Astrodome.

Let me clarify this, Yeoman’s success corresponded with being able to recruit players to play in the most high tech football stadium the world had ever seen, called at the time the 8th wonder of the world.

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And the use of NIL before it was even thought of

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It’s not like we’re lining up against Bama… they should be able to freaking score something. The little faith CWF had started to build in me has been brought back to 0.

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Astrodome or not the key ingredient in Yeoman’s rebuild was his recruiting. Not his Veer Offense. Inferior talent could not run The Veer.

By 1966 we had future NFL talent on the roster. Had UH been in The SWC then we might well have won it.

Our recruiting, since Herman left, has been less than desirable. Eight years of sub-par recruiting is on the field right now.

Our “Brain Trust” has been in charge. They hired Major and Dana. That is 7 years of Cougar Football.
They did get us in The Big 12, for which they deserve tremendous credit.

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Our recruiting the last 2 years should be showing better results today than what we’re seeing. It needs to get better, but it’s hard to call it “sub-par” when those were two of the best years in over a decade. We’ve attributed the last classes like 2022-2023 to Herman’s success in 2015, so we can’t really call it bad just because these coaches aren’t getting results.

Previous classes (247 Rankings):
2010 class ranked 52.
2011 class ranked 71.
2012 class ranked 56.
2013 class ranked 54.
2014 class ranked 75.
2015 class ranked 88.
2016 class ranked 35.
2017-2021 classes ranked in the 70s.
2022 class ranked 53.
2023 class ranked 48.

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Herman had a Top 35 class in 2016.

Look at the decline since then!

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Right. That one year was an obvious outlier. 2022 and 2023 were both substantially better than every year after the Herman one-hit wonder.

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The first 38 seconds of this clip is us in a nutshell.

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I left out one really major reason for Yeoman’s original turnaround of UH football. Even before the veer UH was the FIRST university to fully integrate it’s athletic program in Texas. Warren Mcvea, Elvin Hayes, Don Chaney and all that followed. We were the leaders of change in the south at that time.

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Yeoman’s first great team was 1966.

On that team were Warren McVea, Don Bean, and Paul Gipson.

The other 82 players were White.

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The nostalgic look at UH 60 years ago is fun, but that is where it ends. The game has changed too much since then to see any parallels.

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I believe that credit goes to Coach Sampson and his crew . . . . .