Tanking Has Come to College Football. Is That a Problem?
From the Astros to the 76ers to the Dolphins, teams across sports tank with future success in mind. The Houston Cougars now seem to be following suit—and raising a host of concerns in the process.
It’s not surprising that the Houston Cougars have gotten off to a slow start under new head coach Dana Holgorsen. That often happens when a big-name college football hire comes in and tries to win games with players who were recruited by the previous coaching staff. (Hello, Nebraska!) What is surprising, however, is the way Holgorsen has responded to that start. The Cougars’ record may be unremarkable, but their approach to this season is entirely unprecedented.
Over the past 15 years, Houston has established itself as a power conference–caliber program that isn’t in a power conference. It went 14-12 against power-conference competition from 2006 to 2018, notching wins over Oklahoma, Florida State, and Penn State. It went 13-1 with four wins against ranked opponents in the 2015 season, and 9-4 with two victories against top-five schools a year later. Houston lobbied to get into the Big 12 in 2016, but was denied an invitation—seemingly less because the team couldn’t cut it on the field, and more because the league’s member schools feared the Cougars would limit their ability to land Texas’s top high school recruiting talent. And while Houston couldn’t secure an invite to a bigger league, its coaches regularly did. Since 2008, all four power-conference programs in the state of Texas have hired coaches or assistants with Houston ties: Baylor hired Art Briles, Texas A&M brought in Kevin Sumlin, Texas Tech hired Kliff Kingsbury, and Texas lured Tom Herman. Just before West Virginia was formally voted into the Big 12 in 2011, it hired a former Houston coach to lead it—Holgorsen, who served as Sumlin’s offensive coordinator at the school before Kingsbury.
Last December, Houston fired Herman’s successor, Major Applewhite, on the heels of an 8-4 campaign. “Winning is defined at the University of Houston as 10-2,” school president Renu Khator told staffers at a holiday party. “We’ll fire coaches at 8-4.” In January, Houston flipped the script by poaching a head coach from a power-conference school—Holgorsen, who returned to Houston after a decade away. This was the first modern-era instance I can remember of a coach willingly leaving a power-conference school for a non-power-conference school, and Holgo had his reasons: Bankrolled by billionaire Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, Houston made him the highest-paid non-power-conference-school coach ever. If winning at Houston is defined as 10-2, though, Houston is not winning this year. The Cougars are just 2-4 and would need to win out to match the record that got Applewhite canned.
But Holgorsen doesn’t seem to mind the losing—as long as it all happens this season. Following a 1-3 start, the program announced that its starting quarterback, D’Eriq King, and no. 2 wide receiver, Keith Corbin, would voluntarily sit out for the remainder of the fall in order to preserve a final year of eligibility and return to the team in 2020. According to a teammate, their unusual decisions were coordinated by Holgorsen as part of a plan to preserve as many talented players from a seemingly wasted season in hopes of improving next year. The idea of downgrading Houston’s current team to upgrade its future one could be considered the first tanking experiment in college football history. Only tanking in college sports brings almost none of the rewards that it does for professional teams—while exacerbating nearly all of the ethical concerns.
Let us measure D’Eriq King by the Kyles he has beaten. At Manvel High School in Texas, he was in the same graduating class as Kyle Trask. College recruiters viewed Trask as a future FBS quarterback, and he’s currently revitalizing Florida’s offense as its starter. Those same recruiters saw King as a wide receiver or defensive back. (Clemson’s Dabo Swinney wanted to play him in the slot.) In spite of this, King won the Manvel starting QB job over Trask and went on to break a state record for career touchdown passes set by Kyler Murray. (Technically not a Kyle, but close enough.)
Entering the 2017 season, King was listed behind a pair of Kyles on the Houston depth chart: Kyle Allen and Kyle Postma. King opened the year as a receiver, but by October he’d emerged as the Cougars’ starting QB. Allen later forewent his final year of NCAA eligibility to declare for the NFL draft, believing he had a better chance of becoming a pro starter than beating out King for the Houston job. Stunningly, he was right—Allen has since become a quarterbacking phenom for the Carolina Panthers.
In 2018, King fully broke out, accounting for 50 total touchdowns during his first season as a full-time college starter. His sequel and senior season in 2019 seemed like it would double as the 5-foot-11 star’s audition for the NFL. But after scoring 12 touchdowns in four games, King decided this wouldn’t be his senior year after all. He would redshirt, which much of the college football world took as a sign that he was transferring to Oklahoma.
In 2018, the American Football Coaches Association convinced the NCAA to pass a rule allowing players to take a redshirt season even if they played in as many as four games. (Holgorsen was a proponent of this.) The coaches pushed for the rule because they wanted more roster flexibility, but it also had an unintended effect: It gave players the opportunity to transfer more easily. Kelly Bryant’s transfer from Clemson to Missouri after starting four games in 2018 is a perfect example.
However, King did not redshirt to transfer. He and Corbin were the first players to use the revamped rule to redo their senior seasons, announcing they would use the coming months to develop before coming back for the 2020 campaign.
It has since become clear that King and Corbin did not come up with this idea on their own. According to a Twitter thread posted by former Houston guard Justin Murphy, Holgorsen approached several Cougars seniors and asked them to redshirt so they could return in 2020. Murphy, a graduate transfer from UCLA who had applied for a medical waiver to get a sixth season of eligibility and assuredly could not get a seventh, said that Holgo had recruited him to the Cougars under the impression that the team was trying to win now. Yet while Murphy battled through injuries for the 2019 Cougars, Holgorsen was potentially telling healthy players that 2020 was more important. So Murphy quit the team and took to social media to air his grievances.
As part of his thread, Murphy used a word that has never been used in the college sports landscape: He said Houston is trying to “actively tank.” If what Murphy tweeted is true, that assessment seems accurate. Holgo would have indeed acted to remove the best players from his 2019 team to add them to his 2020 roster.
Technically, all redshirting players are asked to play later instead of helping their teams now. But there are usually good reasons for this. Coaches may feel that a player is buried on the depth chart or would benefit from having time to develop, or an injury may prevent a player from being able to take the field. It’s unprecedented for a healthy star like King to redshirt in this fashion, and it’s obvious that his redshirting has made the Cougars worse. His backup turned starter, Clayton Tune, went 9-of-27 passing with three interceptions against Cincinnati in his first conference start. (Tune’s backup is Logan Holgorsen, Dana’s son. In that Cincy game, he went 0-of-2 with a pick.)
The debate over the ethics of tanking has been ongoing in the pro sports world for some time now. Supporters—and I consider myself one—point out that purposeful losing allows franchises to hoard valuable assets that can later help them win big, while mediocrity often keeps teams mired in mediocrity. The Astros and Cubs tanked and won championships; the 76ers used the Process to come a ridiculous bounce away from making the NBA Finals; and the Browns, well … let’s give them time. Opponents of tanking argue that the whole point of sports is trying to win, and routinely cite the demoralizing effect tanking can have on fan bases and players. Tanking may be an effective strategy from the perspective of a general manager or front office, but why should we cheer for a team that’s given up? And what of the talent who has to go out and play the games? How do players go to work with the knowledge that management is sort of rooting against them?
What Houston is doing nullifies the benefits of tanking in pro sports and raises a host of issues that don’t come up in the pros. College football teams don’t get draft picks or recruiting benefits for performing poorly. Unlike the pro sports examples mentioned above, there is no sustained long-term vision in the Cougars’ case—just the hope that the team will be slightly more competitive exactly one year from now.
And while MLB, NBA, and NFL players involved in tanks are doing jobs—Miami Dolphins quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick has a cap hit of $5.5 million this year to throw twice as many interceptions as touchdowns—the NCAA has spent decades crafting a legal argument that college athletes are not employees. If Murphy’s thread is true, that means Holgorsen asked King to play a fifth unpaid season instead of pursuing any professional opportunities. Sure, maybe King will boost his draft stock next season, but it seems just as likely that he won’t. (Leaving Houston to test out pro opportunities certainly didn’t hurt Allen’s career.)
Houston’s approach also makes a mockery of all the players using a year of eligibility on a season that the coach has given up on. Holgorsen reportedly only asked some seniors to redshirt; heading into this fall there were 19 seniors on Houston’s roster, plus a graduate student, many of whom had already redshirted in years past. Those other guys won’t get to press the reset button in 2020. This is it for them, and their coach seemingly doesn’t care. Tanking in professional sports asks millionaires to swallow their pride and make the most of a bad job; tanking in a college sports asks unpaid labor to remain unpaid even longer. Not only that, but it asks other unpaid labor to keep putting their bodies on the line as part of a season that doesn’t matter.
The person who benefits the most from tanking, of course, is Holgorsen. While pro sports coaches are criticized if their teams fall short of expectations in their first years on the job, college coaches are often given a pass. It’s widely accepted that they might struggle when coaching a team populated by players recruited to fit a predecessor’s system. In fact, college coaches’ debut seasons aren’t even referred to as Year 1; they’re commonly called Year Zero. If Houston finishes 3-9 this season, it will reflect poorly on Applewhite. If Houston finishes 3-9 this season and then 9-3 next year, it will appear as if Holgorsen inherited a mess and created something great. King is a legit star, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him guide Houston to a conference championship or top-tier bowl spot in 2020.
Tanking treats sports like the business it is. When there are millions of dollars at stake, franchises must consider how to allocate resources, and some people get paid money to lose. College sports are also a business, but trades on the lie that it isn’t in order to funnel all of the money to the people wearing suits and headsets. Houston’s tanking plan exploits that. It asks the have-nots to further sacrifice for those the system already benefits.