Dana Holgorsen has a lack of ego that allows him to do things few other coaches would dare to do.
Chris Pezman laughs when he considers this for a second.
He said you can begin with his hair.
You know the hair if you don't know anything else. It is similar to a mullet. Holgorsen has a habit of running his fingers through those long, tightly curled locks when he is talking. The business in the front has laid off a lot of staff. The result is something like a hairstyle created by Jackson Pollock when Holgorsen is on the sideline. There is a chaotic work of art.
Holgorsen's hairstyle has become shorthand. He was a head coach for 12 years, winning the 2012 Orange Bowl and shepherding West Virginia from the Big East to the Big 12.
"He's not going to give you a great speech like General Patton," said Ryan Dorchester, the director of football operations. It is not in his nature to take credit for anything. It feels random.
If everything goes according to plan, Holgorsen's team will follow up a 12-2 season with another stellar campaign, win the American and push for playoff consideration. When Holgorsen left his spot in the Power 5 at West Virginia to take a chance on a program he loved, most of the college football world thought he was crazy.
People will have to consider the wins more than the hair or the Red Bulls if all that happens. He will have secured his place as one of college football's best coaches.
Yes, right?
Holgorsen doesn't care what people think.
Holgorsen doesn't want people to give him credit.
He was running through a laundry list of changes he has implemented to bolster the program and get it ready for the Big 12 move next year, but he pivoted to an alternate narrative because he wasn't comfortable with the way he laid it out. He said it was about his staff. Almost every one of them followed him from somewhere else and they know how he wants things done. No one should notice Holgorsen behind the curtain if the machine is running smoothly.
He doesn't want to be the smartest person in the room. He is.
The first step on the way to Houston was dumb luck.
Holgorsen's first day as an assistant at Texas Tech was December 1999 No one knew what to do when he was slumped in a chair in an office with the other new coaches.
Leach ordered him into the room.
He told them to go to the airport and recruit.
Four assistants looked at each other confusedly.
The previous staff washelmed by his father, Spike, and he had cobbled together a list of top recruiting targets. Their intel was limited. Is it a good idea to go recruit? Is it possible to recruit someone?
The man was not impressed.
He pinned an oversized map of the state to the wall.
After hitting his finger on the map, he took one of his assistants. Then the state of Texas. The person goes another way. He pointed at the person.
He told them to go to Houston.
It was all done. Holgorsen bought a plane ticket and made calls from a pay phone after taking a few scraps of paper.
He made many trips back over the next two decades.
He took a job on the Houston staff in order to be able to call plays for the first time in his career after he left Texas Tech. He met Oliver Luck while he was there. After the resignation of Bill Stewart as West Virginia's head coach, Luck was hired as West Virginia's athletic director and Holgorsen was hired as the head coach.
Holgorsen preferred Houston to be his preferred recruiting area. He would go back to his hometown every few months after buying a house there. He used to drive through Houston's campus and check in with his old friends. He noticed that the school was growing alongside the city, now the fourth- largest metro area in the US.
He said it wasn't great, but he could see how it could get better.
Houston was added to the Big 12 in 2016 as a result of Holgorsen's lobbying. The league stayed at 10 teams but the process convinced Holgorsen that his team had a future in the Power 5.
Holgorsen was given his first chance to take the Houston job. Tom Herman moved to Texas after winning there. If he wanted it, the job was his.
The man did. He didn't want to take it.
He was about to take over at West Virginia. There were legitimate Big 12 talent on the West Virginia team. He would be leaving too much. He decided to stay.
The terrain was different three years ago. The West Virginia team peaked at 6 in the AP poll. A bunch of vets were leaving. Major Applewhite had just been fired as head coach of Houston.
"Chris called and I told him I was on my way," Holgorsen said. As simple as that, it was.
The stars came together.
After his team lost the bowl game in Florida, Holgorsen flew to Houston and started working. His family and friends moved into his house. He didn't return.
He likes to have a good time, even if he doesn't have hair like everyone else.
When he was the head football coach at West Virginia, Holgorsen shuttled between the office and his house, creating an escape from life. If the team had a Saturday off, the entire staff would come over to watch the games. David Long Jr. remembers taking his father on a recruiting trip. David Jr. challenged Holgorsen to a game of 8-ball because he was a pool shark. Holgorsen was able to hold his own.
They went back and forth.
By the time Long arrived at West Virginia, his father and coach had become friends. When David Jr. came for a visit, he would go to the basement and watch another game.
The best sports bar in West Virginia was located in Holgorsen's backyard.
Houston has a lot of sports bars, restaurants, and concert venues. A man can have fun in Houston.
The answer seemed obvious when the pundits tried to figure out why a coach would leave a Power 5 program for a Group of 5 team. Holgorsen wanted to eat Tex-Mex and drink a few beers before going to the Astros game.
Holgorsen said that it was a perk. I don't apologize for the fact that it is. I knew it could get to Houston.
It was not easy for Holgorsen to start at Houston. After losing the opener to Oklahoma, the team dropped two of their next three. It was time for a change. He wanted a number of players to opt out of the rest of the season and take a redshirt in hopes of a better 2020 team.
It was unpopular.
Do you take a job and redshirt everyone? Who is responsible for that? Pezman made a statement. It does not happen.
Holgorsen didn't pay attention. He knew the numbers. Houston's graduation rate was abysmal, with more than a dozen players exhausting eligibility. There is a chance that a redshirt year can help. The roster wasn't good. There wasn't any depth beyond the front runners. Houston needed to preserve experience. The AD backed his coach after Holgorsen explained it all.
King was one of a number of players who transferred at the end of the year.
When he first arrived, Holgorsen said it didn't go as he expected. We had a team that was used to doing things in a certain way and we weren't going to do them in a different way. That will get you a poor 8. people were angry
Holgorsen was optimistic about Houston's chances in 2020. Houston finished that season with a losing record, despite the fact that it could've been an eight win team.
The decision to leave West Virginia for Houston seemed to have netted him little more than better dining options.
He has the same vision he had when he took the job. He believed in what he wanted. His commitment to the university is unique, even though some people didn't trust the timelines.
In the year 2021. it all clicked. After losing its opener to Texas Tech, Houston went on to win 11 in a row and play for a conference title. The development of one of the country's most prolific passers and Houston's defense proved to be one of the nation's best is a meaningful development for a team coached by a one-time Air Raid coach.
All of the seemingly random choices Holgorsen had made along the way seemed brilliant. Houston has a chance to win the American and join the Big 12 in the future. He ponied up $1 million of his own money to help finance the new football building. He's ready to go.
He's brave. He's a risk taking person. He did something that not many people would do. He has been willing to bet on himself and the people around him.
Belk asks why you want to hitch your wagon to Dana Holgorsen.
It's a strange match. He is a defensive man. He began his career as a graduate assistant at Alabama. He wants to become a head coach, and he's one of the hottest commodities in the coordinators. For the past six years, he has followed the guy who might be the poster boy for the opposite ethos of the defensive minded Saban.
What does that guy look like?
We both see the bigger picture and sometimes we are on different ends of the spectrum. It is about the people for me. Many places are cookie cutter. There are no robot walking around here.
He remembers sitting at his desk for the first time. He was a little machine when he was in Alabama.
He was starting to notice that it was very quiet in the building. He looked out the door and didn't see anything. The town was not real.
The man was surprised. The people went home at night.
Sometimes less is more in the Holgorsen culture. There are things that are negotiable and things that are not negotiable.
There are hours that can be changed. Winning is not something that happens.
Doug Belk likes it here because he's been in other systems. You don't do anything else. It's not fun if you win. It's not always better to get more. At some point it's worthless because of more games, more practices, more money.
This may be why people focus on the hair. It's obvious, but there's something else that distinguishes Holgorsen. Holgorsen doesn't watch the clock or give speeches in a sport driven by micromanagers. He wants to know how his staff will respond to his questions, but he knows the answers. He will adopt their new ideas on the spot when they surprise him with an explanation.
The energy he brings to the sideline is seen by everybody. His greatest quality is how he manages people and how he makes them come together. He has a good idea of what's happening around him.
If Houston delivers on this year's expectations, packs the stands, wins a conference title, breaks ground on a new football facility and rides off into the sunset, what will happen? Holgorsen says he's not as big of an idiot as people think.
There's a huge display of recruiting prospects in the conference room next to Holgorsen's office He said that he has a plan for the future. He has removed a few from his list. He wants to go higher. Houston has a lot of stuff.
Holgorsen says there is more than one dozen headed elsewhere. He understands that they want to play Power 5 ball. Maybe he will have a chance to lure them back in a year or two after he shook their hands. He helped build West Virginia through the transfer market and he could probably do it again here.
He thinks the high school ranks offer the most bang for the buck. Even if one approach has worked before, he's not married to it. He is always looking for market inefficiencies. He zigs.
He does things his own way. He's one of the most intelligent people I've been around and a lot of people try to check boxes and do things differently than he does.
Holgorsen doesn't want to talk about that. He pulls off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair to think about dinner.
It's Houston, after all. The person is Dana Holgorsen.
He doesn't know what he's doing. I will do something. I don't apologize for anything.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
