Texas Tech football: UH’s Dana Holgorsen provides bulletin board material for Tech

No team should need extra motivation for the first game of the season.  But in case the Texas Tech football team does, Houston head coach Dana Holgorsen might have provided some via comments he made to the U of H student body this week.

According to James Muller, the sports editor for Houston’s student newspaper, The Daily Cougar,  Holgorsen essentially made a guarantee to his student body when talking about the season’s first game.

"“They go by ‘Wreck’Em Tech'”, Holgorsen said.  “Nah, we’re going to wreck Tech.”"

Of course, every coach is going to project an aura of confidence ahead of a game, especially when trying to rally support among his student body.  But there’s no doubt that this game is going to be a bit personal for the Houston head coach.

After all, Holgorsen has significant history with Texas Tech.  From 2000-2007, he was part of Mike Leach’s coaching staff in Lubbock where he coached receivers and spent time as offensive coordinator.

But what might make this game even more personal for the third-year Cougars head coach is that he reportedly wanted the Texas Tech job back in 2018 when the Red Raiders hired Matt Wells without even giving Holgorsen an interview.

Several media outlets, including David Collier of television station KMAC in Lubbock, reported that Holgorsen, who was at the time the head coach at West Virginia, coveted an opportunity to interview for the Tech job while others reported that some of Tech’s big-money boosters had already arranged a meeting between Hocutt and Holgorsen, an opportunity that Hocutt declined.

Thus, from the moment that Holgorsen took over at Houston in January of 2019, fans on both sides of this equation began pointing to this year’s season opener and next year’s return game in Lubbock as referendums on Hocutt’s decision to go with Wells over Holgorsen.

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But it’s not as if Holgorsen has lit the world on fire with the Cougars.  Overall, he’s gone just 7-13 including a 5-9 mark in conference play.  Meanwhile, Matt Wells is just 8-14 with the Red Raiders.  What’s more, neither man has managed to produce a winning season at their current school.

However, the one advantage to hiring Wells over Holgorsen might be the absence of needless drama.  While all of Wells’ drama has surrounded what has taken place on the field, Holgorsen has had some serious turbulence to navigate off the field.

As early as October of 2019, Holgorsen’s first season in Houston, reports began to surface that all was not well within the U of H program.  In fact, former Houston and Texas Tech offensive lineman, Just Murphy, went public with claims that Holgorsen was actively tanking that year by forcing key seniors, including QB D’Eriq King, to take a redshirt when they were not injured in hopes of returning a more competitive squad in 2020.

Of course, controversy is something that has been part of Holgorsen’s career since he was named the head coach in waiting at West Virginia in 2010.  Some reports suggested the Holgorsen had been working to undermine his then-head coach Bill Stewart while others suggested that Stewart had asked people to dig up dirt on Holgorsen in an attempt to keep his job.

Eventually, Holgorsen would rise to the throne in Morgantown in 2011, a year before his program would join the Big 12.  Since that time, he’s gone, 5-2 against the Red Raiders with all of those games coming as head coach of the Mountaineers.

But now, he’s leading the Cougars into this week-one showdown and that adds an extra bit of intrigue to this matchup.  And in true Dana Holgorsen fashion, he’s couldn’t help but throw a little bit of red bull onto the fire.