The Future Of This Site

ElViento: So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this site, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

I’m planning to have one weekly update, with links to applicable UH-related posts from SB Nation, as well as links and commentary on any other Cougar news items of the week. Then, a top-five list that’s completely unrelated, just for giggles.  So it’ll look something like this:

This Week On SB Nation Houston (7/1)

–“Just Trust Me” – Feature on Mack Rhoades’ first year at UH

–Karma delivered by former Cougar Rob Johnson

–Sporting News gives Keeum back-handed compliment

Around The Web

–Houston Cougar volleyball announces its 2010 schedule… First-year coach Molly Alvey isn’t ducking anybody. The Coogs will play TCU, UT-Austin, Florida State, Oklahoma and Tennessee among others.

–Recent Astro draftee, and former Cougar Chris Wallace is tearing the cover off the ball with Greeneville. He homered three times in his first seven games as a professional.

–And at last check, Blake Kelso was hitting .333 for the Vermont Lake Monsters (yes, that’s the real team name) in the Washington Nationals system.

Unrelated Top Five – Songs About Heaven Or Hell

Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven

AC/DC – Hell’s Bells

OPM – Heaven is a Halfpipe

The Clash – Straight to Hell

Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven

P.S.

I’m now actively looking for more writers to have a better variety of opinions ’round here. If you want to sound off, use the ‘Contact Us’ tab to shoot me off an e-mail. Thanks.

SB Nation Houston has launched!!

ElViento: Popular sports opinion website SB Nation has recently started opening up hub pages for various cities. (If you follow sports in-depth online, chances are you’ve probably read at least one or two blogs that they host.)

Unlike ESPN, they have deemed the city of Houston worthy of its own local site.

Unlike some other media entities in this city, which shall remain nameless, they didn’t hire a Longhorn to do a Cougar’s job.

That’s right,  yours truly has been hired (Yes, hired! As in, money!) to cover the Houston Cougars for the site, which was launched Wednesday night.

You can find the site at houston.sbnation.com.

In addition to myself, the site will feature the writing of (among others) Tom Martin (of Rockets blog The Dream Shake), David Coleman (of Astros blog The Crawfish Boxes) and Rivers McCown (of Texans’ Battle Red Blog).

I can’t say enough about how excited I am to be a part of this. I am (at present) the only writer whose focus will be on college athletics, and the folks at SB Nation had the good sense to have the Houston site cover UH, not UT or A&M. (I’ll also be writing up Rice when I get the chance.)

Anyway, this is the reason that my posts around here have been brief, recently. I’ve been writing for that site, which has been taking up my energies.

I don’t know what the future of the Scott &  Holman will be. It’s likely that SB Nation won’t want me to write about every little bit of Cougar info that ever comes up, so I’ll still likely post the minor stuff around here. I’d also love to bring in some other writers here to provide their own perspective on UH sports. But I encourage you all to follow me over to the SB Nation site. My Cougar coverage will be much better there than it ever was here.

That’s all for me for now. GO COOGS!!

Party Time

ElViento: Are you doing anything this Thursday evening? Of course not.

So why not come out, enjoy some food with yours truly, David Nuño of 1560 The Game, and former Houston Rocket Robert Reid?

More info here, with an RSVP function.

All are welcome. Hope to see you there.

Noble out at UH

ElViento: Well, I guess this answers the question of whether or not UH has the money to buy out a coach in a minor sport like baseball.

The two key candidates to keep an eye on are Todd Whitting, an assistant at TCU, and David Pierce, an assistant at Rice. Both men are UH grads with past experience as assistants for the Cougars.

Who do you like, Cougar fans?

We’re famous again!

ElViento: I recently helped out Adrian of the fantastic UTEP blog (if you care about what’s going on with other C-USA teams) Miner Rush. He had a two-part UH football preview, which you can find here (the part where I answer his questions) and here (the part I wasn’t really involved with).

If you’re anything like me, you’re all over anything football related at this point, so enjoy.

Sims Out For 2010

ElViento: Howdy everybody. For reasons that I can’t go into now, but which I will fully explain in the next week or two, I’m not going to be going into much depth on stuff for the time being. I ask for a little patience, and promise that very soon, my coverage of the Coogs will actually be better than ever. I’m very excited, and you should be, too. Until such time as I can fully discuss everything to the extent that I want, I will continue to at least mention the top stories of the day, and allow for discussion. Along those lines…

Charles Sims was ruled ineligible for the 2010 football season on Tuesday. Obviously, this isn’t a good thing, but there is talent at the running back position. I think it’s worse than the Castile, Dugat, Dean and Tatum losses, but still well short of catostrophic.

Also, Cougar play-by-play guy Tom Franklin announced on Tuesday via CoogFans.com that he is being retained by ISP to be the Voice of the Cougars in 2010. I’m a huge fan of TF, and I’m glad to hear that ISP listened to the fans, when they spoke up and said they wanted Tom back.

That’s all for me for now. Looking forward to sharing the good news with everybody soon.

Go Coogs!

Oh dear Lord, that can’t be right

ElViento:

-My friend lent me a movie that I’m reasonably excited to watch.

-I got to meet a loyal reader of the blog.

-I rocked out to the Black Keys in my car on the way to and from the stadium. (Seriously, do yourself a favor, go buy the “Brothers” album.)

By that standard, it wasn’t a bad evening. Unfortunately, there was a game on. In said game, the Houston Cougar baseball team lost to the Rice Owl baseball team, 24-3. At baseball.

Yes, that score happened with two teams playing baseball. Well, at least one team was playing baseball.

So after Friday’s meaningless contest against Southern Miss, the Cougar baseball season will be over, officially closing down the Cougar athletic year for the summer. After Thursday’s game, a three-month wait for football doesn’t sound so bad.

Sixth time’s the charm? Coogs will have to beat Rice this week

ElViento: The Conference USA tournament begins tomorrow at Cougar Field, and one thing is for certain: if Houston can’t beat the Rice Owls on Thursday (for the first time in six chances), their season will be over very soon.

First things first – the Coogs face Marshall on Wednesday. Houston won two of three against the Thundering Herd at Cougar Field earlier this month.

There are complicated scenarios in which Houston could advance to the championship game with a loss to either Marshall or Rice, but by far the easiest way in would be to beat both. In fact, if Houston wins its first two games, it will have clinched a spot in the championship game, and could relax against Southern Miss on Friday.

Head coach Rayner Noble has announced that Michael Goodnight will start the Marshall game, and William Kankel will get the nod against the Owls. He has not committed on a Friday starter, which makes sense, given how much more important the first two games are. If those two games are even remotely winnable in the late innings, Noble needs to throw everything he’s got out there.

For all of the disappointments of this season, there is no denying how well the Cougars can play when things are clicking. They swept a trio of Big XII foes at Minute Maid Park, won four of five in California, and most recently defeated a darn good home team in East Carolina twice when their season depended on it.

This kind of reminds me of the feeling that surrounded the men’s basketball team heading into the conference tournament. Despite a talented squad, the season has been a disappointment. So now the team has nothing to lose. So let’s sit back, and see what happens.

Baseball doomsday scenario averted

ElViento: The Cougar baseball team grabbed two of three wins from East Carolina on the road this weekend, avoiding the potentially embarrassing scenario of hosting a conference tournament and not qualifying to play in it.

In typical University of Houston style, more people have voiced concern about the above scenario than have actually attended a Cougar baseball game this year. Despite playing for a fan base that is fickle at best, and even though they have avoided doomsday, it has been a rough season for the Cougar baseballers. Barring a miracle post-season run, UH will finish below .500 for the second straight season. This has happened in spite of a distinct downturn in the overall talent of Conference USA this year, as compared to most. More frustrating than the fact that they have been losing is the manner in which they have lost. Through Saturday’s regular season-ending loss, the Cougar pitching staff had issued one hundred and twenty-two more walks and hit batters than the Cougar hitters have accumulated. That speaks to a general lack of discipline, which reflects poorly on the coaching staff. There’s clearly talent on this year’s team, it just hasn’t translated into wins, and somebody needs to be held accountable for that fact.

The argument is no longer whether or not head coach Rayner Noble deserves to stay, but whether or not UH can afford to buy out the last two years of his contract. The fact that Noble stayed home for Thursday’s game to watch his daughter’s graduation in the middle of a playoff push might indicate that Noble has one foot out the door.

If Noble resigns this off-season, it will cement an almost-eerie ability of athletics director Mack Rhoades to talk coaches into resignation. In less than a year since Rhoades took over, volleyball coach Bill Walton resigned suddenly, followed by men’s hoops coach Tom Penders, who had claimed he wasn’t leaving, then had a meeting with Rhoades, and immediately decided to resign. Women’s basketball coach Joe Curl has also resigned since Rhoades took over, but that was widely expected, given Curl’s lingering health issues.

Turning our attention to the present, UH is guaranteed to get to play three games in the conference tournament, as part of the new pool play format. One pod will contain the 1, 4 and 5 seeds, while the other pod will contain 2, 3, and 6. Each team plays the other two teams in its pod, and one team from the other pod. (1 vs 6, 2 vs 5, 3 vs 4) The top team from each pod by record (tiebreaker: head-to-head) advances to the championship game. Pending Saturday’s results, it looks like Houston is likely to earn the 5- or 6-seed. Either way, it means the Cougars will have at least one more shot at the Rice Owls, who have beaten UH in all five contests between the two teams this year.

Even a lot of the actual show-up-to-games fans didn’t expect Houston to make the conference tournament, and the coach may be out the door, so hopefully the Coogs can channel that “playing with house money” feeling, and play worry-free baseball. Lord knows this team is talented enough to make a run if they play their best.

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I have mentioned the personal tragedy surrounding incoming Cougar hoopster Fabyon Harris in this space before, but for a much better write-up, check out this piece in the Chicago Tribune.

Reading the article, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between Harris and one of my all-time favorite Coogs, Anthony Alridge. While I don’t know that Alridge has the dramatic past that Harris does, consider the following parallels between the incoming guard and the former running back: Both missed out on being recruited by larger schools due to being of a smaller stature. Both draw raves for their “have to see it to believe it” quickness. And both will have a chip on their shoulder whenever they face SMU, due to academics. Harris pulled out of a verbal commitment to the Mustangs, after it became apparent that the coaching staff had no faith in Harris’s ability to earn a qualifying score on the ACT, and signed another player at Harris’s position. Alridge played his high school football in SMU’s backyard, and was miffed when SMU failed to recruit him. His desire to torch SMU became even more pronounced when then-head coach Phil Bennett implied that the reason his team had not recruited Alridge was that his academics were insufficient to get him into SMU.

Hope to see you at Cougar Baseball Stadium this week. It may be hard to believe, but unless the Coogs stun the conference for their second baseball tournament title in three years, this week will mark the end of the 2009-10 athletic calendar for the University of Houston. I’ll try to keep on finding interesting things to write about this summer, so stay tuned, and we can count down the days until football, together.

Go Coogs!

Cougar roundup: Baseball loses, what’s next for softball and men’s hoops?

ElViento: Hey everybody, we’re famous! Sort of. National college football blog College Football Zealots e-mailed us recently, asking for our take on the upcoming Cougar football season, and I was happy to oblige. You can check out what I had to say here, and see if I did a fair job of previewing the team.

Okay, on to less self-congratulatory and more analytical (-ish) items.

The Cougar baseball team dropped a game against Rice on Tuesday, a game which was played for little more than pride. Rice got off to a 3-0 lead in the first half of the first inning, only to watch the Cougars storm back with a 5-spot in the bottom of the second. That lead held for a few innings, and all of the sudden it was “Oh-my-God-where-did-our-lead-go-and-why-is-our-third-string-catcher-pitching?”

(I wish I was making that last part up, but I’m not that funny. It actually happened.)

The final was 15-5, but it doesn’t count as a conference game, so it’s kind of a whatever. That’s what type of a baseball season this has been for UH. We lose to Rice by ten, get swept in the Silver Glove, and the only reaction I can muster is a shrug of the shoulders. And baseball is my favorite sport. If that’s not a desperate plea for a new coach this off-season, I don’t know what is.

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I know I’m not breaking any news on this one, but it came out recently that freshman forward Bryce Clark and junior forward Kahmell Broughton will be transferring out of the Houston basketball program. They join Desmond Wade in that decision, leaving the Cougars with six returning scholarship players: Zamal Nixon, Maurice McNeil, Nick Haywood, Adam Brown, Kirk Van Slyke and Kendrick Washington. There has been much speculation over Van Slyke’s health this off-season, so the list may ultimately be down to five.

In light of that, what is a reasonable expectation for Cougar fans to have of first-year head coach James Dickey? From where I am sitting, I only really want to see two things:

-The Cougars remain competitive. We shouldn’t be going 4-12 in Conference USA, or anything. It’s not that deep of a conference. Say what you will about Tom Penders, but if you don’t think he could grab a dozen kids from the campus rec center and field a competitive team in C-USA, you’re lying to yourself. Remember what he did in the 2008-09 season with zero returning starters?

-The incoming freshmen show promise. In fairness to Coach Dickey, he is trying to throw together a recruiting class at the last second. But we’ve  been told that he’s a great recruiter (and we passed on a couple of great recruiters to hire him), and Dickey has repeated that he’s not going to throw out scholarships just to fill a roster, so I want to see it. I want to see hope for the future.

How about you, Cougar fans? What do you want to see from Dickey and Co.?

Oh, this doesn’t really relate to next year, but I’d also like to see Chris Colvin transfer to UH. A national top-100 player out of high school, Colvin spent one year at Iowa State, before opting to transfer this off-season. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t announced a destination yet. Houston could look like an attractive option, as we figure to run an up-tempo style of basketball (which Colvin has expressed an affinity for) and we hired Daniyal Robinson as an assistant. Robinson was the assistant for the Cyclones who guided Colvin to ISU in the first place.

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I’m also way late on commenting on the Cougar softball team, whose season ended with a C-USA tournament semi-final loss to eventual-champion East Carolina recently.

After the Cougars came within one game of reaching the College World Series in 2008, the expectations were high heading into last season. Basically the entire lineup returned, but without ace pitcher Angel Shamblin, the season ended disappointingly. Without a doubt, 2010 was a step back in the right direction.  The Cougars ended up with a 30-24-1 record against a brutal non-conference schedule. A number of freshmen (including Bailey Watts, Brooke Lathan, Reina Gaber and Ashleigh Jones) showed a lot of promise for the future. On a team without a senior, there were only a couple of regular contributors who were even upperclassmen.

But most importantly, the pitchers looked good. The 2009 team proved (in case anybody wasn’t already convinced) that softball is a pitching-dominated sport. You can’t win without an ace. Watts and junior Amanda Crabtree both had solid seasons, and showed flashes of being that shutdown pitcher that Houston needs. Under head coach Kyla Holas, the Cougar softball team looks like it’s in great hands for the future.

That’s all for me for now. Hope to see you somewhere, praying for a series victory over ECU this weekend by the Cougar baseball team.

Go Coogs!