2012 Conference USA Football Previews: From Sea To Shining Sea

Mid-Major School A loses High-Octane Offensive Coach B, then replaces him with Young High-Octane Assistant C. It is a formula that both Houston and Toledo followed this year in losing their successful coaches (Kevin Sumlin and Tim Beckman, respectively), and it makes sense. Offense puts butts in the seats, and once you go down the spread offense road, it is difficult to convince yourself to turn back.

Unless you are Southern Miss, anyway. In that case, you lose the leader of your high-octane, Conference USA-winning attack, and you replace him with … a 60-year old defensive assistant, who brings in a 58-year old, run-heavy offensive coordinator and a 57-year old defensive coordinator. Why go young, when you can go old?

One has to credit the University of Houston’s football program. Like the state in which it resides, the Cougars do nothing halfway. The Cougars went 11-1 in 1973, 2-8 in 1975, and 10-2 in 1976, reaching the Cotton Bowl in their first season in the SWC. They went 11-1 again in 1979, went 1-10 in 1986, then a combined 28-6 in 1988-90, winning a Heisman Trophy and, in 1990, reaching as high as third in the polls. They followed that by going 2-19-1 in 1993-94 and 0-11 in 2001. While some teams, even in their own (current) conference -- Southern Miss (14 years of between 7-9 wins since 1996) and UAB (eight years of between 3-5 wins since 2002) -- have managed to carve out the most consistent, mundane (good or bad) existences, Houston goes big.

In 2011, Houston carved out plenty of “big” real estate once again, not only coming within one game of a BCS bowl bid (which would have been their first … Cotton Bowls aside, anyway), but creating an explosive team by almost any definition.

Curry was a dominant force for a team that sneaked away with a 5-0 record in one-possession games last year, and now he is a Philadelphia Eagle. Quite a few interesting players return for Doc Holliday’s Thundering Herd in 2012, including a set of skill position players on offense, but Curry’s production was equal to that of about three decent players; will Marshall be able to sustain a nice step forward without one of its best players ever, not to mention a few other defensive playmakers as well?

It was easy to root for Doc Holliday when he took over at Marshall a couple of seasons ago, primarily because his name is Doc Holliday. It turns out, however, that he can coach a little bit. The Herd improved slightly in 2011, from 98th in F/+ to 87th, but they showed serious close-game prowess despite a true freshman quarterback, and they improved by two wins and pulled off just their second seven-win season since 2003. They were young enough that you can talk yourself into them a bit, but a Wyoming cycle could be in play -- the Cowboys went 6-0 in one-possession games on their way to a 7-6 finish in 2009, went just 2-3 in such games and fell to 3-9 in 2010, then went 5-0 again in 2011 and finished 8-5. An improved team might find worse luck this fall (and therefore end up with a worse record), but with the way Holliday has been recruiting, the program’s trajectory is solid, even if the squad takes a step backwards in 2012.

This time last year, UTEP was undergoing an experiment. Coming off a season that saw it become one of the worst bowl-eligible teams of all-time (they ranked just 102nd in F/+ but reached six wins by beating teams ranked worse than them and upsetting SMU), they decided to do something simple to rectify the struggles of one of the worst defenses in the country: They made everybody bigger.

SBN’s own Tomahawk Nation has long embraced the notion that, when it comes to your defensive front seven, bigger is better. And along those lines, Florida State has served as nice proof of the relationship between size and success -- according to Def. F/+ rankings, the Seminoles’ defense has improved from 99th in 2009, to 41st in 2010, to sixth in 2011. That they have gotten bigger and bigger in that time does suggest a solid correlation. But there is still some gray area there. FSU has recruited incredibly well recently, and as we have seen for a while, more highly-touted recruits tend to be bigger and more athletic. Talent probably played at least as large a role in FSU’s improvement as anything else. UTEP, then, was an interesting test case last year. They simply added weight to current personnel … personnel which happened to perform horribly the year before.