Dana Holgorsen is nothing if not candid. Whatever the topic, he doesn’t mince words. What you see is what you get.
So when Holgorsen sat down with The Athletic nine months ago to discuss the state of the Houston Cougars ahead of their first season in the Big 12, the head coach had no issues calling it like he saw it. Their schedule was “hard.” The Cougars needed to catch up to their Big 12 brethren in several areas, from infrastructure to name, image and likeness operations.
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And when it came to his own job status, he bristled at the idea that there was any uncertainty, bringing it up unprompted when asked about his recruiting strategy.
“Everything we do is about next year,” Holgorsen said in March. “In my mind, you’re bringing 50 percent of your roster (that’s) high school kids every year … that’s signing for the future. There’s teams out there going 75 to 90 percent transfers because they know they’ve got to win or they’re f—ing done. That ain’t me, brother.”
Holgorsen then referenced an ESPN report that intimated that his seat could warm if on-field results didn’t improve.
“We won 20 games in two years,” Holgorsen said. “We won bowl games in back-to-back years. I have five years on my contract with a f—ing impossible buyout. … So there ain’t no f—ing hot seat in my mind. There just ain’t.”
Holgorsen’s perception of his job security didn’t match the reality. Houston stumbled to a 4-8 debut season in the Big 12, and on Sunday, the Cougars fired Holgorsen after five seasons.
Yes, the buyout is substantial, especially at a place like Houston, which isn’t even a full-share member of the Big 12 yet. The Cougars will pay Holgorsen $14.8 million over the next four years: 100 percent of his salary through 2025 and 60 percent in ’26 and ’27. Per his contract, he’ll continue to be paid monthly through the rest of the deal.
But the Cougars deemed the cost worth it because of where the program was headed.
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No one — not Houston president Renu Khator nor athletic director Chris Pezman nor board of regents chair and program benefactor Tilman Fertitta — expected the Cougars to step into the Big 12 and dominate. They all knew the transition from the American Athletic Conference to a Power 5 league would be arduous. This year’s other three newcomers endured similar struggles: UCF, BYU and Cincinnati went a combined 6-21 in Big 12 play. All four newcomers finished in the bottom six of the league standings.
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But it wasn’t simply wins and losses. It was the way those results played out.
The Holgorsen era at Houston, which contained promise when the two parties came together, leaves the Cougars largely underwhelmed.
Swiping him from West Virginia allowed the Cougars to dream. The convergence of unique circumstances that allowed a Group of 5 program to hire a sitting head coach with a winning record away from a Power 5 program raised eyebrows.
Holgorsen had been at Houston before as an offensive coordinator under former coach Kevin Sumlin from 2008 to ’09. He fell in love with the city, established longstanding relationships and visited regularly during subsequent offseasons, even after he took over in Morgantown.
When Holgorsen and West Virginia reached a stalemate in contract negotiations after the 2018 season, Houston pounced. The Cougars fired Major Applewhite — who went 15-11 in two seasons — and reeled in Holgorsen.
The program, which had served as a stepping stone en route to Power 5 positions for the likes of Art Briles (who went on to Baylor), Sumlin (Texas A&M) and Tom Herman (Texas), thought they had found their forever coach in Holgorsen. The Houston metro area of more than seven million people allowed Holgorsen to lean into his active social life and blend into the big city as opposed to being the most visible face in a smaller college town. Holgorsen had found his home and had no desire to leave Houston.
“Y’all want to go win some games?” Holgorsen said upon his hiring, holding a can of Red Bull in his left hand. “Let’s go win some games.”
But those wins were much harder to come by than even Holgorsen imagined. The success the school envisioned, in the form of conference championships, New Year’s Six bowl games and loaded recruiting classes, never truly materialized. Given his Big 12 experience, he seemed like the right guy to lead Houston into its new league. He had done it before when West Virginia went from the Big East to the Big 12.
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In Holgorsen’s five seasons, Houston had a winning record just twice: an impressive 12-2 run in 2021 and an 8-5 showing in 2022 that was considered disappointing given the expectations. The Cougars went 31-28 under Holgorsen.
That didn’t cut it at a place where Khator said at a holiday party seven years ago that “winning is defined at the University of Houston as 10-2 … We’ll fire coaches at 8-4.” When Holgorsen was introduced in 2019, Fertitta alluded to Khator’s infamous comment: “We’re not going to say what we demand anymore, because I’ve read it all over the country in the last two years … but you can just push repeat.”
“We don’t want to be 8-4,” Fertitta said then. “That’s just the way we’re made here now at the University of Houston.”
The journey was bumpy from the start. After a 1-3 start in 2019, Holgorsen employed an unprecedented strategy, redshirting a number of key players, including star quarterback D’Eriq King. The goal was to age the roster for a longer rebuild, but Houston went 4-8.
The following year, Houston went 3-5 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and the Cougars were one of the most impacted teams in the country, having eight of their games canceled or rescheduled.
Houston finally hit its stride in 2021. After losing the season opener, the Cougars won 11 in a row, played for a conference championship and then beat Auburn in the Birmingham Bowl to finish 12-2. But they would never recapture that success.
The last two seasons included too many head-scratching defeats. In 2022, Houston lost in overtime at home to a Tulane team playing a third-string quarterback, gave up 77 points at SMU and dropped its home finale to a listless Tulsa team, all of which left a sour taste.
This year, the issues became even more glaring. Falling behind 28-0 to nearby rival Rice — a team Houston had beaten eight times in a row before this year — was unacceptable (the Cougars eventually came back but lost 43-41 in double overtime). The offense failed to score a touchdown for the first time since 2014 in a 36-13 home loss to TCU, the program’s Big 12 debut.
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Houston was shut out for the first time since 2000 in a 41-0 loss to Kansas State. Two of the Big 12 teams it lost to, Cincinnati and UCF, were new to the Big 12, too, yet both outclassed Houston by double digits.
Some issues popped up repeatedly, like slow offensive starts or an inability to get defensive stops late in close games. That comes back to coaching.
Those losses frequently put Holgorsen’s candor under a spotlight. His frank nature is admirable; it’s far preferable to the typical coachspeak that most in his position repeat on a weekly basis. But the approach became problematic every time the Cougars suffered a frustrating loss. And when Holgorsen shirked coachspeak to pass blame onto his players or staff, it led to a bad look.
No such instance stood out more than his postgame news conference following a narrow 34-27 win over Rice on Sept. 24, 2022. The Owls came close to pulling off the upset, and Holgorsen was frustrated.
“Somehow, we figured out a way to win. I’m grateful for that,” Holgorsen said. “There is a lot of stupid stuff, once again. I ain’t taking responsibility for that. At some point, [the players] just, we have to quit doing that.”
Later, while noting that he “wasn’t pleasant at halftime to coaches or players,” he said, “I was not really pleased with all of our players. I am tired of doing it, man. I am tired of yelling at them. I am tired of motivating them. I am tired of all that crap.”
Holgorsen apologized for the comments two days later, but he sounded just as “tired” as he said. The Houston job was probably a tougher build than Holgorsen realized when he returned. Yes, the Cougars were upgrading their facilities, like TDECU Stadium and a pristine indoor practice field, but they lagged in other areas.
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Fan support remains fickle. The school set a record for season ticket sales this year with more than 23,000, but empty seats were still noticeable during games, even with improved attendance. In a city with NFL, NBA and MLB teams among the multitude of entertainment options, it takes a rah-rah approach, akin to the one Tom Herman brought to Houston in 2015 and ’16, to get UH faithful fired up. That’s not who Holgorsen is.
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When the name, image and likeness rules changed in 2021, Houston football started behind and didn’t begin to make up ground until this year. That hurt the Cougars’ ability to attract players in the transfer portal.
The school broke ground earlier this month on a new football operations building that will open in 2025, but until then, UH is “woefully behind” their Big 12 brethren in that area, Pezman said in March.
To Houston’s credit, it did grow Holgorsen’s staff salary pool considerably to make it competitive with the program’s new conference mates, and Holgorsen added staff accordingly, expanding the recruiting department, hiring analysts and giving raises to on-field coaches, including defensive coordinator Doug Belk, who makes $1 million per year.
And Holgorsen’s complaints about what Houston doesn’t have weren’t always well received by fans who have seen men’s basketball coach Kelvin Sampson, who took over a men’s basketball program with decrepit facilities in 2014, pull that program from the doldrums into a perennial national title contender.
Making matters worse is the recruiting drop-off. While the Cougars showed real signs of promise in the 2022 and 2023 cycles, even winning battles with Power 5 programs for blue-chip recruits, the 2024 cycle has seen a huge drop-off, with the Cougars ranking 102nd nationally in the 247Sports team rankings, worst among Power 5 teams. They have only eight verbal commitments.
Some of that is by design, based on the Cougars’ strategic focus toward the 2025 class, which is expected to be loaded in Houston. But to operate in one of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the country with the benefit of a new Big 12 affiliation and still rank that low creates poor optics.
Houston is a place with immense potential, but it’s not a turnkey job. Between the demanding administration, wavering fan base and occasional financial challenges, it takes work. But given its location and proximity to recruits, its Big 12 status and the flashes of success it has had in the past — from winning Southwest Conference titles in the late 1970s to 13-1 campaigns under both Sumlin and Herman — it’s possible to win big.
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Houston has had tastes of success, but they have been fleeting. The Cougars thought Holgorsen would take them to sustained greatness, but it didn’t work.
Now, the school must figure out how to make his buyout possible.
(Photo: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)
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