Rice football didn’t get off to many fast starts last season, forcing the team to play catch up all year. Can they become a better first quarter team?
Ultimately it’s not how you get the points that matter, it’s having more of those points than the other team when the clock reads 00:00. Rice only outscored their opponent though for quarters once in 2017. A tendency to start slow did them in several times, forcing them to play catch up and put up a dearth of garbage time stats.
Rice scored 17 points in the first quarter last season. That’s 12 first quarters and 17 points, which averages out to about 1.4 points per quarter. Not great. The Owls also seemed to move a bit slower after halftime, posting their second-lowest scoring quarter then:
| Score by quarters | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | Total |
| Rice | 17 | 56 | 43 | 79 | 195 |
| Opponents | 142 | 136 | 79 | 72 | 429 |
The skewed distribution of the Owls’ 2017 scoring comes into focus further on a percentage basis. Rice scored only nine percent of their total points in the first 15 minutes of regulation. That makes for a sizable deficit when compared to their opponents who scored nearly a third of their total points in the first quarter alone:
| Score by quarters | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | Total |
| Rice | 9% | 29% | 22% | 41% | 100% |
| Opponents | 33% | 32% | 18% | 17% | 100% |
No matter which way you look at it, Rice needs to find a way to be more productive at the beginning of games. Setting the tone by getting on the board early is going to be extremely important in Mike Bloomgren’s first year as the head coach.
Intellectual Brutality, in terms of the physical pounding the Owls hope to deliver, will take its toll on teams later in the game. Tired teams make mistakes, hopefully opening the door for opportunities later in the Rice offense. That, combined with a strong start, should move the needle on the win column in 2018.
