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2025 Rice Football Season Preview: Cornerback

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Next up in our 2025 Rice Football Season Preview: cornerback. Here’s our breakdown of the Owls’ plans for the group this season.

The corner room is going to be brand new in 2025, something Rice football hasn’t had to experience in quite some time. Fortunately, the Transfer Portal has allowed for some veteran leadership to be injected into this position group during the offseason, but that hasn’t removed all the question marks in the crucial defensive spot. How well will this new-look room adjust to so many moving parts?

Rice Football Preseason Preview: Check out the rest of the series here.

This piece is part of our 2025 Rice Football Season Preview. Get access to it, as well as all other preview posts such as positional breakdowns, depth chart and schedule analysis and more when you subscribe on Patreon today. 

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** Photo credit: Maria Lysaker **

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QB Flux marks 2025 American Athletic Conference Landscape

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New faces and unknown commodities mark the state of quarterback play in the American Athletic Conference in 2025.

The days of running it back with the same starting quarterback at the Group of 5 level might not be over just yet, but they’re certainly becoming less and less frequent as player movement accelerates and the college football world becomes more connected and informed. That new-world reality is particularly stark when assessing the American Athletic Conference quarterback landscape for the upcoming 2025 season.

Among the 14 AAC teams, three distinct categories can be defined.

Starting Fresh

The AAC will be replacing some marquee names at the position in 2025. Seth Hennigan has finally run out of eligibility following a record-setting career at Memphis. Tulane’s Darrien Mensah was one of the more high-profile transfer stories of the offseason, signing with Duke. Potential Heisman darkhorse Bryson Daley has graduated from Army and the gunslinging Chandler Morris is no longer at North Texas.

Conservatively, that list includes four of the top six players at the position from a season ago. Tack on roster reshuffling at Charlotte, Rice and Florida Atlantic and you’ve got seven of the 14 programs in the league who will be starting new quarterbacks in 2025. When it comes time to sort out a potential pecking order the sheer number of new faces at the most important position will make that a challenge.

Returning, but Unrefined

Consistency, especially at the quarterback position, is usually viewed as a positive and while that’s probably the case for the next batch of program’s it’s not as if the guys they’re bringing back are slam dunk, top-of-the-line Group of 5 quarterbacks.

Temple (Evan Simon), UAB (Jalen Kitna), Tulsa (Kirk Francis) and East Carolina (Kaitin Houser) make up the returning quarterbacks who produced mixed results at their programs a season ago. Francis and Simon completed less than 60 percent of their passes, Kitna and Houser threw double-digit interceptions. Add on coaching changes at Temple and ECU (albeit, hiring their interim head coach) and you’ve got more uncertainty to deal with.

Any or all of those four players may improve their game in 2025. That’s what their respective staffs will be expecting. But it’s not a sure thing and there’s no guarantee this group isn’t better than some of the reshuffling the programs in the first group did during the offseason.

Returning Studs

Which brings us to the shortest list: returning studs. At the forefront of this group is Navy quarterback Blake Horvath and UTSA signal caller Owen McCown. Horvath spurred one of the more improbable turn-around seasons in the AAC last year, leading Navy to 10 wins. McCown led all returning AAC passers with 3,422 yards passing last season and 25 touchdowns.

South Florida’s Byrum Brown gets a nod in this group, but with an asterisk of sorts. He was tremendous in 2023 before missing most of 2024 with an injury. When he did get on the field, he wasn’t nearly as impressive. He deserves at least some benefit of the doubt that a fully healthy version of himself belongs in this group, but even with him included, the list of bonafide stars at this position is extremely thin.

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Rice Baseball 2025: MLB Owls Update – July 2

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The 2025 MLB season is underway and Rice baseball alums are making the most of their time in The Show. Here’s the latest from the MLB Owls.

Dane Myers – Miami Marlins

Another week, another thrilling play by Dane Myers, helping to encapsulate a truly remarkable season by the former Rice baseball great. This time, the big moment came on the basepaths, complementing another strong week in the field and with his bat.

Myers is on the All-Star Ballot. You can vote for him up to five times a day using this link.

Through July 2, Myers is hitting .298 with 12 extra-base hits, 12 walks and 41 strikeouts. His OPS is .770 and he’s collected 20 RBI.

Injured List

Anthony Rendon – Los Angeles Angels

Rendon is slated to miss a significant amount of time following him surgery this spring. The bad news is another bump in an injury-plagued stint with the Angels; Rendon missed a chunk of last season with an oblique strain.

Matt Canterino – Twins AAA

Canterino was thought to have a real chance to crack the big league roster at some point this season, converting himself to a reliver this offseason in hopes of limiting the stress on his arm and preserving his health. Unfortunately, he’s set to miss a third consecutive season, undergoing shoulder surgery in early March. The Twins since released him and signed him to a minor league contract while he rehabs.

Knocking on the Door

The following Owls began the season in AAA:

  • Tristan Gray – Charlotte Knights (White Sox)
  • Evan Kravetz – Louisville Bats (Reds)
  • Glenn Otto – Sugar Land Space Cowboys (Astros)
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2025 Rice Football Opponent Season Preview: North Texas

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Three years into his time at Denton, it’s about time for Eric Morris to start turning progress into wins. What can Rice Football expect from the Mean Green in 2025?

Head Coach: Eric Morris
Record at School: 11-14 (2 Yr) | Career FBS Record 11-14 (2 Yr)
Offensive Coordinator: Jordan Davis | Defensive Coordinator: Skyler Cassity

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College Football Returning Production woes in the American

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Returning Production, or the lack thereof, is a clear hallmark of what life will be like in the American and the Group of 5/6 for college football going forward.

ESPN’s Bill Connelly updated his key college football metrics following the spring portal cycle and, usurpingly, the biggest brands from the SEC and the Big Ten sat atop most of the rankings. What didn’t stand out as clearly at the time — at least to my naked eye — was the impact the modern landscape has had on team building at the lower levels of the sport.

Returning Production seeks to approximate the meaningful contributors from last year’s team who are still on the roster for the upcoming season. It’s not a perfect measure — returning every player from a bad team still likely leads to a bad team — but it does demonstrate which programs pose to gain the most from continuity and experience.

As I began my preparations for the upcoming season preview series, I noticed just how little returning production most AAC teams had. So many key pieces are gone, either to the Transfer Portal of the NFL Draft, leaving the AAC flush with teams installing so many new players this offseason.

Connelly puts just seven AAC programs in the top 100 nationally in returning production. Three crack the top 60. Here’s the full list:

Nat. RkConf. RkTeamRet ProdOff RkDef Def Rk
111USF 67%69%2266%19
272UTSA 64%82%246%89
353Navy 63%74%1452%73
664Temple 55%65%3945%96
765Tulane 52%49%8456%57
776Tulsa 52%46%9358%51
887N Texas49%44%9855%65
1018Army 43%36%12051%80
1039ECU 43%51%7735%117
10510UAB 43%43%10343%101
11011FAU 41%50%7932%127
11312Rice 41%36%12246%91
11513Memphis 40%39%11441%108
11814Charlotte 38%35%12340%109

It’s no coincidence that the top three programs (USF, UTSA and Navy) all return their starting quarterbacks and several key skill players. That USF also brings back so many key defenders gives the Bulls a better starting point, at least from a roster construction standpoint, than most if not all of their conference peers.

How this plays out on the field this fall remains to be seen, but the era of slow builds and roster continuity seems long past, at least at this level of the sport. When your program does get the luxury of “running it back”, you better not miss. The odds of you getting that much continuity again soon are slim to none.

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