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Sports

Cougar High fans missed a nice game

Judge Dredd

Chris Elliott

The T-shirt read, "There is no high like a Cougar High." 

The grey-haired man sitting eight rows down from the press box must have been an alumnus. He was probably one of the fans who had supported the team since he was in his twenties and had the opportunity to experience true college football game atmosphere in the late seventies and late eighties. But that shirt said it all. 

For a normal person it wouldn't be too hard to understand that "There is no high like a Cougar High" was a play on words, eluding to the high a Houston fan should get by watching his or her team playing on a perfect Saturday afternoon. 

But to a malicious and annoyed sports columnist, that grey haired man's shirt said something much more spiteful, tactful and surprisingly true. UH might as well be called Cougar High School — well at least when it comes to fan support for its athletics teams.

A total of 13, 242 people were in attendance to witness Houston score 34-second-half points and earn a victory over Central Florida, a team that is better than its record would insist. In all actuality, it looked more like 9,000 people. That is a pathetic turnout for a team that is slated to have one of its best seasons in recent history.

In fact, that's pretty pathetic attendance for any team.

Houston entered its game against the Golden Knights Saturday with a 5-3 record. It had put up impressive numbers against Texas-El Paso a week earlier and was wading through the midst of a battle for Conference-USA positioning. It would have been safe to say that the Cougars were in a must win situation.

Though they may have resembled a sloppy, inexperienced high school team in the first half by dropping easy passes on offense and badly missing passes on the defensive side of the ball, the Cougars played like tuned athletic machines as the game progressed — providing a plethora of highlights. It's just too bad no one was there to see it.

Forget about the term "fair-weather fans." At least fair-weather fans go to the games when their teams are winning. 

And we're not just talking about the football team here. Let's jump to the court. The men's basketball team, under the direction of Tom Penders, turned out to be one of the most exciting teams to watch in basketball last season. They thrived off of forcing turnovers on defense and capitalizing on the other end by throwing down some of the nastiest dunks in the country. They won 21 games and were a bubble burst away from making the tournament, were they could have gone one or two games deep. Yet, the average home game attendance was less than 5,000.

This should not be considered an attempt to help out the public relations guy at the UH athletics department. It's just the truth, which brings us back to square one.

The shirt read, "There is no high like a Cougar High." 

To the average fan, whose attention is drawn by big offensive plays and scoring, rather than a defensive struggles, Saturday's UH-UCF match up would have been just like a trip to heaven. The teams combined for 1,046 yards of offense and had more than 8 plays of 30 yards or more.

Junior running back Anthony Alridge was a human highlight reel and senior Battle pounded out three red zone touchdowns. Senior quarterback Kolb had yet another 300-yard, multi-touchdown performance through the air, but things like victories, nice stats and must-win games don't matter to the less than fair-weather fans at Cougar High.

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