Cougars

Houston opened its first football season in the autumn of 1946, and it introduced itself on 21 September that year against Southwestern Louisiana Institute. Nearly eight decades on, the Cougars still play in Scarlet and White as members of college football's top division, known around the city simply as the Coogs.

The early decades belonged to the Missouri Valley Conference, where Houston took the title four times before the 1950s were out, and then to the Southwest Conference, where four more championships followed between 1976 and 1984. Conference USA and the American Athletic Conference each added their own titles later, eleven in all, though none of them ever widened into a national one.

No player did more for the program's name than Andre Ware, who threw his way to the Heisman Trophy in 1989 and went seventh overall in the following year's NFL draft; his No. 11 hangs retired at the university. Warren McVea had already broken different ground, becoming the first African-American to hold a scholarship at a major Texas college football program before going on to win a Super Bowl.

It is still, at bottom, the team a university built for itself in 1946 and sent out to play Southwestern Louisiana.