Houston News Blog

Photo courtesy UH

​On Monday night, Cal State-Fullerton defeated UCLA in one of those so-called easy basketball openers that so-called major powers are supposed to easily win. Kind of like Houston's Tuesday night opener against Nicholls State was supposed to be one of the easy games for a so-called major team to win.

And make no doubt about it. The Cougars were fully aware of what happened in Los Angeles on Monday night. And they weren't going to let it happen to them. Which is why, despite trailing 7-0 only 1:13 into the game, they went on to the relatively easy 92-60 victory last night.

"All coaches are concerned about opening games," head coach Tom Penders said after the game. "No matter how many you've been in, no matter who you're playing, all you have to do is look at this past weekend....so it was a good test for us, and I'm very pleased we came out with the win."

Photo courtesy UH

​The time has come. The time for Tom Penders and his Cougars basketball team to show their worth. The hopes are that this squad is one that will make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the early 1990s.

There are a couple of things working in the team's favor. First and foremost being the return of guards Aubrey Coleman and Kelvin Lewis. Coleman, a 6'4" senior, was the C-USA Newcomer of the Year last season as well as first team All-Conference USA. He was one of the conference's most versatile players last season, finsihing third in scoring with 19.4 points a game while finishing fourth with 8.2 rebounds. And Lewis, a 6'4" senior, was third-team All-Conference USA and made the C-USA All-Defensive Team. Lewis also averaged 18.0 points a game -- fourth in the conference in scoring -- and nailed 93 shots from behind the three-point line.

"In terms of basketball now, there are very few players as talented as Aubrey," Penders told Hair Balls. "And it's all because he's put a lot of hard work into it. I can't take credit for it. I can tell him what I think he needs to work on. The reason is we have these rules where we can't work with players for like five months a year. So you give them a program, and you tell them what they need to work on, and Aubrey has worked on it. And so has Kelvin. I think both of them have dramatically improved their games."

​I'm sure if all of you have heard, but Tracy McGrady has set a target date to return from microfracture surgery, and that date is November 18. What he's going to do once he comes back or whether he's even ready to come back are secondary issues, because chances are if you heard this news when it broke, then you actually found out about this before the following people:

-- Tracy's doctors

-- Rockets GM Daryl Morey

-- Rockets coach Rick Adelman

-- Pretty much anyone employed by the Rockets

Proving once again that what he lacks in passion for actually playing basketball he makes up for with a bizarre misdirected passion to be a doctor, Tracy McGrady gives all of us the straight dope on when he's going to be coming back, maybe kind of, sort of, maybe not. Because this is what Tracy McGrady does -- finds any way he can to keep himself as the center of attention even if it means alienating the franchise that continues to fulfill their obligation of cutting him seven figure, bi-weekly checks for doing nothing more than blogging once a month and presumably rehabbing his knee. Seriously, I think this is unofficially the 1,000th self-diagnosis we've gotten from Tracy since he arrived here in 2004.

Two key players of two teams decided to break important news in odd ways this week.

Steven Tyler, aging frontman for Aerosmith, dropped word that he was quitting the band (maybe; no one's clear) not by calling his bandmates, but by mentioning it to a British interviewer.

Tracy McGrady, aging forward for the Houston Rockets, announced he'd be coming back from injury soon (maybe; no one's clear) not by telling to management or his teammates, but in an interview with a sportswriter. (An American sportswriter, at least.)

What ever happened to communication?

Who was the worse transgressor here? It's Tuesday, meaning all important answers come in chart form.

​For most of his tenure in Oakland, Tom Cable has been your run-of-the-mill, overmatched, "dead man walking" NFL head coach. When he was hired last season in the wake of Lane Kiffin's firing, the things that jumped out at me about Cable were:

-- His only head coaching experience consisted of four seasons at the University of Idaho where he compiled a sporty 11-35 record

-- He was the first Idaho head coach in 22 years to be fired; his most recent predecessors had all been successful and moved onto better jobs

-- He looks EXACTLY like "Sean and John Show" producer Kyle "The Taskmaster" Manthey. Check it out...

Separated at birth?

​ 
But surely, the casual football fan did not give a rat's ass about Tom Cable when he was hired. It took Cable's caving in assistant coach Randy Hansen's face in a team meeting to make him somewhat interesting, it took his denying it to make him laughable, and it took allegations of physical abuse from a handful of women he either dated or married going back to the Reagan Administration to make him pathologically creepy and dangerous.

So with these skeletons now out of Cable's closet and with all of this appearing to be a classic case of "where there's smoke, there's fire," now we're in a place where Cable's job security is being debated as a result of these allegations (again some of them taking place nearly 20 years ago). It's at the point where the National Organization of Women has now taken a keen interest in Oakland Raiders football.

To be very clear, I think hitting a woman is the most cowardly thing anyone could do (unless of course it's by another woman and it happens in a food court at a grubby casino in California, then it's hilarious). But do we really need Tom Cable's abusive track record of "MMA fighter trapped in a fat husband's body" to fire him as coach of the Raiders?

​Tom Penders has been tasked with returning the Houston Cougar basketball program to relevance. And that's a task at which he feels he's been successful. But he's yet to succeed with the ultimate goal of basketball relevance, and that's getting into the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.

Now, the Cougars have won basketball games in Penders' five seasons coaching the team. But they haven't won enough. And for the most part, they haven't won the right games because they've been defeating teams in Conference USA.

During the Cougars' last great basketball run, the team was a member of the Southwest Conference. And in those "glory days of the Southwest Conference," Penders tells Hair Balls, "when you had the University of Houston and Arkansas driving the bus, that conference was respected as one of the top four or five conferences in the country. Now we're in a conference that's not considered in the top -- we're around anywhere from 10 to 12 -- so it makes it a little more difficult in that regard."

Photo by Jeff Balke

​There's a popular belief in NBA circles that the third year is when a player makes the transition to stardom, if he's going to make it. Among point guards, that worked for Chris Paul and Deron Williams, and much has been said about Aaron Brooks making a similar - though smaller - leap. Through five games, Brooks seems on the right track, averaging 20 points and eight assists while directing the Rockets to a surprising 3-2 record.

But slightly under the radar is Carl Landry, the other overachiever from the Rockets' 2007 draft class. Can he, much like forward Jeff Green in Oklahoma City, also make the third-year jump?

If Wednesday's matchup with the Lakers was any indication, it's possible - especially on offense. Landry's 20 points and eight rebounds were crucial as the undersized Rockets again held their own with the star-studded Lakers at Toyota Center, losing a 103-102 overtime heartbreaker in Ron Artest's Houston return. The Rockets led throughout, but as usual, three close calls down the stretch all went the direction of Kobe Bryant's team.

But individual wins or losses don't define an 82-game season, particularly for a young team like the Rockets. It's about development and the ability to put their best team forward by April, and the Rockets learned a lot about Landry in their battle with the defending champions.

Photo courtesy UH

​Guy V. Lewis last coached the University of Houston men's basketball team in 1986. His last great team lost in the 1984 NCAA title game to the Georgetown Hoyas. He left a legacy of 27 straight winning seasons. Fourteen seasons with 20-plus wins. Fourteen NCAA tournament appearances. Five Final Fours and two championship games.  

That's a history that many college problems would die to have.  

But since 1986, the Houston Cougars have been living off of that history. And living off history doesn't really much help the present.  

Pat Foster succeeded Lewis, and he, at least, kept up his end of the bargain. In his seven seasons, the school went to the NCAA tournament three times and the NIT three times. But by his departure, the program was running on fumes. And after the tenures of Alvin Brooks, Clyde Drexler, and Ray McCallum, the Houston Cougar basketball program was in shreds and about to be deposited in the dustbin of history.

Enter Tom Penders.  

Penders came to Houston with a history of turning around college basketball programs, hence the nickname Turnaround Tom. Which came about by leading the likes of Rhode Island to the Sweet Sixteen in just his second season as head coach, and starting at Texas a basketball program which is now usually one of the top ranked in the country.

Penders is entering his sixth season as the head coach of the Cougars. And while the program has yet to return to the heights of the early-1980s, it has risen far from the depths of the early part of this decade.

"We've turned the program around," Penders told Hair Balls. "It's not as far around as I want it to be. My goals are always higher than my university's goals. I'm very proud of how far we've come. We went from the bottom of the league team, consistent bottom -- two, three -- to consistent top three....It's been Memphis, UAB, Houston, then it's a big drop-off in terms of record, conference record, postseason play. I'm very proud of that."

​Those of you who listen to my show know that I am fond of placing the "occasional" friendly wager. While handicapping the day-to-day and week-to-week ebb and flow of a football, basketball, or (if you're really sick) baseball season can be enjoyable and, at times, lucrative (especially when betting against the bottom ten QB's in the NFL has turned into an ATM), where I have had the most success the last few years has been placing futures wagers on the over/under for total wins in a season. And when I say "most success," I mean that typically my season bets are so strong that they bail me out of six months' worth of game-to-game ineptitude at the end of each season.

I'm not sure why I've had more success with season wagers other than the fact that over a 16- (NFL), 82- (NBA), or 162- (MLB) game season, you can look at distinct aspects of that particular sport and with fairly decent accuracy say "I think X will happen," and taking it a step further identify a small handful of teams where "X will happen" in spades. Whereas the game-to-game wagering is a bit like day trading (highly volatile and likely a road to financial hardship), season bets are like long-term investing (less volatile, less grounded in emotion, more grounded in rules, and ultimately protecting you from yourself).

Now, season wagers on sports typically come down to "one thing" (raising my index finger like Curly in City Slickers) -- one thing that above everything else needs
to make sense in order for you to pull the trigger. That "one thing" is
different for each sport. In the NFL, it's the quality of the starting
quarterback; in college football, it's a team's schedule; in baseball,
it's starting pitching (although the answer to "Is Cecil Cooper
prominently involved?" should be added as Thing 1-A); and finally, in
the NBA, it's what I call the "Boss Factor," or just how good is a
team's best player.

Photos by Monica Fuentes

​
The Houston Rockets hosted a party last night at Hotel Icon to celebrate the team's new Red Nation marketing campaign. Other than "alternative jerseys" for this year, the team -- as part of the campaign -- has developed a Bill of Red, "a document passed down from high and now ratified by the House of REDpresentatives."

Hair Balls went to last night's event armed with the bill to see how well the party goers (we think about 200 people showed up) represented the Red Nation. Our analysis:

1. Right to wear RED. Yes, plenty of people wore red. They were mainly the people required to be at the party because they worked for the Rockets, but that was a good portion of the people there. It's tough to say if the players support the Nation yet, because the players that showed up -- Chuck Hayes and Carl Landry -- did not wear red.

​It's no secret that the National Basketball Association (the NBA, if you're nasty) has had its share of notorious digital ups and downs - well, mostly downs, actually - when it comes to social media. Whether NBA players are psycho about their technology or just psycho is a judgment call best left to the discretion of the juror. But rest assured, the NBA thinks its players, coaches, and team officials are completely whack when it comes to Twitter, Facebook, and the like. And they must be stopped, damnit!

So, like any good little societal entity, the NBA is releasing a complete set of social media guidelines this week to whip these unruly villain hoopsters into cyber shape. Although a secret source told ESPN the new policy will be "very minimal" and "less stringent" than the rules announced earlier this month by the NFL, we kinda call bullshit on that. Seeing that ESPN's elusive source said that "the NBA's new policy, furthermore, will treat social-networking commentary in the same manner as comments made in the traditional media [and] anyone in the league can be fined or otherwise sanctioned for posts via Twitter, Facebook, etc., that are deemed over the line," uh, we think we might be on to something. Logic 1, NBA Thinly Veiled Rhetoric 0.

Since we figured NBA ballers are damned if they do and damned if they don't, we promulgated a few of our own expert stipulations to be incorporated into the NBA's new social media handbook. We truly hope they'll take them into consideration when drafting their set of mandates, but we promise to be only mildly miffed if they give us the finger instead.

Photo courtesy Rockets

​Do people really think back fondly on any shirts where the color scheme is actually described as "ketchup and mustard"? In Houston, yes. Apparently.

The Rockets have introduced an alternative jersey for this year. "Alternative jerseys" are those worn only occasionally, just enough to merit them being sold at remarkably high prices at souvenir shops.

The new jersey is a nod to those yellow-and-red garish things the Rockets used to wear. Yes, it was while they were winning, and therefore nice thoughts are attached to them, but still. Yellow and red. It looks like a uniform for a team that gets orange slices at halftime. Or a soccer team, whichever is worse.

The new design, we are told, took more than a year to reach fruition.

Are you buying this? It's the net video de jour (which means it's probably been around for a while, and competition will be intense as to who saw it months ago.). An A&M  student launches one from the upper reaches of Kyle Field and hits not much more than net.

As a commenter on sportsjournalists.com said, "And Shaquille O'Neal still can't hit a free throw."

Doctored or not, it's for charity -- the more views the video gets (allegedly), the more a charity that helps overseas kids gets.

You've lost your best player to injury, you've lost the guy who thinks he's the best player to Advanced Wussiness Syndrome, you haven't got a decent big name to take the court for you next year: What are you gonna do if you're the Rockets?

Pitch yourselves as "Red Nation," apparently.

That's the new advertising slogan, officially to be rolled out by the team next week. (Rejected slogans: "Yee-Haw, We're Yao-less!!!" and "The Rockets -- We're Scola-riffic!!!"

The whole "Nation" thing is kind of played out, we thought -- there's Red Sox Nation, ND Nation, Steelers Nation, essentially any team out there, someone's throwing a "nation" after it. (Except maybe the Washington Nationals.)

But "Red Nation"? Didn't we kick their ass in the Cold War?

We guess, though, if your best player is a card-carrying communist you have no choice. And what better way to appeal to the Glenn Beck-loving Teabagger population of Houston than by comparing them to the USSR or Red China?

At least they'll have a nifty poster. (Check it out after the jump.)

​In a little over two months the Houston Cougars men's basketball will begin the sixth season of the Tom Penders era. The Cougars went 21-12 last season and went into the postseason for the fourth time in five years (albeit none of those postseason forays have involved the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament).

At this time last season, Penders didn't know what to expect coming into the season. "I didn't know if we would be a .500 team, but we won 21," he said in an interview in his office last week. "This year, I feel like we've got a chance to be a lot better."

Last season's team was a young team with five new starters. But Penders promises that this year's team will be a good mix of veterans and youngsters: "We're a bigger, stronger team, and deeper team than we were last year."

"There's an awful lot of competition to play," he said about the team. "We have some really talented newcomers. Three guys that started just about every game, four actually -- Desmond Wade and Zamal Nixon, one was starting or the other. Then you've got Kelvin Lewis and Aubrey Coleman -- Aubrey averaged around 20 (19.4 ppg) and Kelvin around 18 (18.0 ppg) -- they're going to be pushed for minutes by some of our newcomers."