Post edited 4:51 PM – September 28, 2009 by TSUBooks

The Houston Cougars are making a beeline for Top-10 status.

The Cougars climbed five spots, to No. 12, in the latest Associated Press football poll released on Sunday.

As Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, the Cougars pulled out a 29-28 victory in front of the largest crowd to witness a game at Robertson Stadium. The Cougars (3-0) open Conference USA play Saturday at UTEP, which fell to 1-3 after a 64-7 beat down from No. 2 Texas.

“As we win, every game gets bigger,” UH coach Kevin Sumlin said. “That's the price of poker. We all know what's at stake.”

Still, don't look for Sumlin to start holding court on the possibility of an unbeaten season or Bowl Championship Series scenarios. Champions from C-USA, the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West Conference, the Sun Belt Conference, or the Western Athletic Conference can earn an automatic berth into a BCS bowl game by finishing in the top 12 of the BCS standings.

Under the current arrangement, the BCS bowls are required to take only one such team. Two teams from non-BCS leagues are ahead of UH in the AP poll: No. 5 Boise State (4-0) and No. 11 TCU (3-0). The first official BCS standings don't come out until next month.

“We've won three games,” Sumlin said. “We've got a whole long season to go. All we can do is play the people on our schedule. We don't have control over anything after that.”

Playing as a ranked team for the first time since 1991, the Cougars rallied from deficits if 21-10 and 28-20 against Tech. The two teams combined to run 173 offensive plays, throw 105 passes and gain 1,063 yards. The crowd of 32,114 broke the previous Robertson Stadium record of 31,818 set in the 2006 C-USA title game against Southern Miss.

“It was a great victory in light of what was happening in our stadium,” Sumlin said. “For it to be the largest crowd since we moved from the Astrodome, to do it for the alumni, the students who showed up, for the students who lined up on Monday, for the fans who were there when we showed up (Saturday) morning … It means a lot to win a game in the last few seconds in front of them against an in-state rival.”

Read the rest of this story:
http://www.chron.com/disp/stor…..40488.html