Perhaps the best trivia question of the offseason: which Texas FBS program holds the longest active winning streak?
You guessed Rice, right?
The Owls kind of fell off a cliff for most of last year. At 0-9, they seemed destined for a third straight year with just one or two wins. They owned a 48-13 loss to Texas and a 41-21 loss to Wake Forest.
Then Rice woke up, scored 31 in the first half against then-3-6 Middle Tennessee, and clung to its lead over the second half to win. They followed that up with victories against North Texas and UTEP to put the finishing touches on a not-so-very-bad year.
Now it’s up to one of Texas’s long-standing bottom-feeders to pull that momentum through to a genuinely exciting 2020 season. Rice actually has a shot to top .500 for the first time since 2014! The Owls have top-ten returning production, highlighted by the rise of quarterback Wiley Green (52.8% completion percentage, 787 yards, 4:2 TD-to-INT ratio in seven games last year) and dominant linebacker Blaze Alldredge (102 tackles, 21.5 tackles for loss, four sacks; all led the team). Indeed, Rice has the very best defensive returning production in college football, a whopping 96%.
Between a decent offence and a much-improved defence, it’s possible Rice could bowl next year. It’s no certainty, but one of Texas’s historically moribund programs may rise from the shadows at last.
Offence
2019 TERSE: 21.0 (121st)
2020 Returning Production (SP+): 63% (70th)
So I know I just said Rice could go 6-6 in 2020. Well, if they do, it will be in spite of their offence.
The Owls were close to as bad as could be on offence last year. The unit topped 21 points twice, and they scored 13 or less on 5 occasions. In a more granular sense, the problem was obvious: Rice had three good players and then nothing.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. Graduating on-and-off quarterback Tom Stewart completed just over 60% of passes and racked up 8 touchdowns to just 2 interceptions, but by and large the QB position wasn’t any good in 2019. Add to that the fact that, well, the magic Stewart employed to actually win a few games won’t come from him any more, if it returns at all. Aside from that relative offensive explosion, when the team scored 31, 20, and 30 in their three wins, Rice averaged under 15 points per game. That’s bad!
The team had three chief weapons on offence: running back Aston Walter (819 total yards, 10 total touchdowns), wide receiver Brad Rozner (770 yards receiving, 5 touchdowns), and wide receiver Austin Trammell (726 yards receiving, 4 touchdowns). Aside from that trio, which sat in a narrow gap from 819 to 739 yards from scrimmage, no other player topped Charlie Booker’s 272 such yards.
The upshot is that both Rozner and Trammell are back for 2020. Yes, that makes the RB position weak as can be. Fortunately, that shouldn’t matter too much so long as Rice can get some good play out of Wiley Green.
Green’s play, pivotal though it is to the 2020 season, is highly suspect. The sophomore racked up some decent numbers last year, but was significantly outplayed by Stewart after the elder statesman took the reins mid-season. The turnaround, remember, occurred after Green was no longer playing. Keeping that in mind, there may be some merit to repeating the strategy and skipping Green for, oh, Jovoni Johnson, for example, who went 10-for-18 for 97 yards last year. Green will have the inside track, but don’t be surprised if someone else’s name is on the top of the depth chart come November.
Defence
2019 TERSE: 42.9 (95th)
2020 Returning Production (SP+): 96% (1st)
Here it is, the keystone of Rice’s sudden turnaround at the season’s close in 2019. Oh, and did I mention they get 96% of their production back for 2020?
The defence was far superior to the offence last year, which is admittedly more of an indictment of the latter given that the former was still 35th-worst in FBS. But the Owls got some genuinely good games from their defence last year, holding Army to 14, Baylor to 21 (a one-score game that’s gobsmackingly close in hindsight), Louisiana Tech to 23, and Southern Miss and Marshall to 20 apiece. Rice lost those games because the offence scored 7, 14, 20, 6, and 7, respectively.
Naturally, the defence…dropped off while the offence got hot in the last three games of the year? The three teams Rice beat scored 28, 14, and 16, which sounds fine until you remember that they were MTSU, North Texas, and UTEP. Not exactly banner performances.
Still, the Owls were pretty good defensively last year. And things look bright for 2020. Blaze Alldredge, the aforementioned team leader in basically everything, is back as a headline senior and the first defensive player in our series who was too good not to pick for this article’s featured picture. Joining him are Anthony Ekpe (2.5 sacks) and Ikenna Enechukwu (1.5 sacks, 4.5 TFL), along with Antonio Montero (83 tackles), Treshawn Chamberlain (64 tackles), George Nyakwol (57 tackles), Naeem Smith, and Elijah Garcia (50 tackles each). The depth on the Owls defence is astounding, with 21 players notching at least 10 tackles, and almost all of it returns for 2020.
Rice isn’t a very good team.
Perhaps the most famous moment in Rice football history isn’t something that happened on-field, but rather an offhanded comment of sorts in a JFK speech. Just a few lines before the president declared ‘We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard’, he illustrated his point by asking the rhetorical question: ‘Why does Rice play Texas?’
Well, because it is hard.
Everything about the Rice job is hard, after all. Nearly impossible, even. It’s a historically bad team with little resources in a relatively small city and no direction on offence.
But things might, just maybe, get better next year. TERSE says the Owls have a shot to bowl, and maybe it’s foolish to think that of a 3-9 team, but I hope they do. There is a chance, however, slim, that Rice can manufacture some real, sustained success in the coming years, parlaying its three-game winning streak into something much greater.
For the sake of college football, let’s all hope they do.
CORN 