Houston Has Been Waiting 37 Years For A Night Like This

It’s been 37 years since Texas Tech and Houston met with both teams ranked. On Friday night, under the lights in Lubbock, Texas, it happens again. And I believe Willie Fritz's Coguars have a chance to be as good as the Houston team that last played the Red Raiders in this kind of matchup, back in 1989. That’s the same year former Houston quarterback Andre Ware won the Heisman Trophy on the strength of newspaper clippings and word-of-mouth. Due to NCAA sanctions, none of the Cougars games were allowed to air on live television that season. Yet, that team finished 10-2 and beat No. 18 Texas Tech, 40-24, at the Houston Astrodome. If Fritz and his Cougars can knock off the defending Big 12 champions, the challenges — and rewards — will be entirely different. For starters, we’ll all get to watch the game on TV (8 p.m. ET Friday on FOX). That could do wonders for a program looking for a breakthrough win. And there’s a trend worth noting: The Cougars have won four of their last five meetings with Texas Tech when ranked. They lost the most recent one. I’ve identified the Cougars as a program — like USC or Florida — that could earn their first invitation to the College Football Playoff this year. With a win on Friday night, many others will begin to do the same. If Houston can pull off an upset win on the road in what is the most hostile environment in the Big 12 — Galaxy Stadium at night — the rest of the schedule looks less like a Crus’n World race: every game won’t be easy, but none will be as difficult as Texas Tech. Houston won’t face another ranked opponent until Oct. 24, when the Cougars travel to Utah, and they also avoid playing BYU this season. There’s another 10-win season within reach for Houston and Fritz, who has done nothing but win. As I wrote in my Ultimate 138, Fritz's résumé includes two junior college national titles, two FCS national title game appearances, leading Georgia Southern to a 9-3 record in its first-ever season of FBS play and two American Conference Coach of the Year awards. Houston was a 10-win team last season that really only got crushed once — a 35-11 defeat at the hands of Joey McGuire’s Texas Tech team. That figures. McGuire has taken the Red Raiders from a program that might finish in the middle of the conference most years and built one that must be respected, if not feared. McGuire is a coaching legend in the state of Texas, boasting a 141-42 record between 2003 and 2016, including 12 straight appearances in the Texas high school football playoffs and four state championships. At Texas Tech, a program that had never won a Big 12 title — let alone earned an invitation to the CFP — McGuire accomplished both by Year 4. Like Fritz, McGuire adapted to the modern era of the sport using name, image and likeness (NIL), the transfer portal and an aggressive recruiting strategy to turn the Red Raiders into a winner. A win on Friday night — a sacred night from August to December in the state of Texas — will see the front-runner for the Big 12 title emerge. In a sport where the attitude and personality of a head coach can shape what happens on the field, there might not be a more compelling coaching matchup. Both have robust pedigrees. Both have won at multiple levels of the game. And both have built teams good enough to push their way into the national championship conversation.