Cougars

Houston is big enough that college football has never had the city entirely to itself, with plenty of professional attention pulling the other way, but for the better part of a century the University of Houston has kept its Cougars part of that conversation. The program's oldest rivalry runs through SMU, a fixture old enough on both campuses that it no longer needs an introduction.

Since fielding its first team in 1946, Houston has won eleven conference championships across four different leagues — the Missouri Valley Conference, the Southwest Conference, Conference USA, and the American Athletic Conference — with titles as far apart as 1952 and 2015. Moving leagues that often is its own kind of history, one built on repeatedly having to prove the program belonged wherever it landed next.

One name still stands above the rest: Andre Ware, who won the Cougars' only Heisman Trophy in 1989 and remains the answer whenever the conversation turns to the best player to wear scarlet and white in Houston.

These days the Cougars play at TDECU Stadium, on the university's own campus, where crowds fill close to 40,000 seats for a program still measuring itself against the same Texas rivals it always has.