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2019 offensive lineman Nick Wagman commits to Owls

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Offensive line will be a priority in the 2019 Rice football recruiting class which now includes preferred walk-on Nick Wagman.

As a former offensive line coach and run game coordinator at Stanford, Mike Bloomgren understands life in the trenches. Part of that wisdom will require the addition of some new players up front, something that has already been made clear in the Owls’ 2019 recruiting class.

It wasn’t a coincidence Bloomgren’s first commitment of the 2019 class came from an offensive lineman. Dallas, TX guard Regan Riddle pledge his commitment to Rice this summer. The Owls have since added to their offensive line haul with the addition of Potomac, MD offensive lineman Nick Wagman. The 6-foot-3, 245-pounder will most likely play along the interior of the line at South Main.

Wagman will walk on at Rice, just like his brother Jack did this year at Maryland. He won’t count toward the Owls’ football scholarship limit, something that will enable the program to take in as many players as possible in this group. This team needs an injection of talent; the more they can get the better.

Walk-on or not, Wagman is ready to contribute as quickly as he can. He had the opportunity to visit campus during the Owls’ junior day this spring and walked away extremely impressed. “You could tell as soon as you walked into the building that there was something special happening,” he said.

A refreshing endorsement from someone outside the program looking in, Wagman has now jumped into the Rice family. He cited his relationship with associate head coach and special teams coordinator Pete Lembo as a key factor in his recruitment. Lembo has been busy along the eastern seaboard, keeping tabs on several prospects of interest to the Owls. Wagman could be just the beginning.

 

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Urgency, focus drivers for Owls, FIU presser notes (10/16)

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Rice football remains winless in Conference USA play and gets their next shot at a win against FIU in Week 8. Mike Bloomgren remains confident this team can make progress.

Head coach Mike Bloomgren kicked off this week’s press conference with an endorsement of this team’s effort and will to win. He said the last six weeks “have been hard on everyone in our building,” but remained resolute that “this team still cares” and is working to right the ship.

Translating that effort into results has been the challenge for this team of late. Bloomgren referenced a quote from the late Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and Seattle Seahawks owner who passed away this week.

As long as we work together with both urgency and determination there are no limits to what we can achieve

Bloomgren cited the diligence and effort of the senior leadership and the freshman class. Both of those groups have seen success on the field. Many of the seniors were a part of the team that won the Hawaii Bowl in 2014. Many of the freshman are coming off successful high school campaigns of their own. The Owls’ current junior class has won five games at Rice. Bloomgren didn’t try to sugarcoat it: “That stinks.”

Coaching up “what’s between the ears” for that group of players is going to be key to the Owls success on the field against FIU this weekend. If that means a change of who’s playing, so be it. More individual packages and plays are going to continue to be incorporated as the coaching staff determines which guys are excelling in particular areas.

Presumably with Evan Marshman starting at quarterback, Rice will try once again for their first win in conference play. Bloomgren said he knows how important a win on Saturday would be for this program. He feels it, and so does the team, who is coming off what he called their “best practice of the year”. The question is: can they do it on Saturday? We’ll find out soon enough.

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Quarterback depth chart, practice update (10/15)

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Rice football returned to practice on Monday with plenty to work on following the Owls loss to UAB plus a quarterback position up in the air.

Starting quarterback Shawn Stankavage was initially diagnosed with a high ankle sprain and underwent an MRI this weekend. The results are pending, and while he has not yet been officially ruled out, he is not expected to be available for the Owls’ upcoming game against FIU.

Stankavage left the UAB game with the injury midway through the second quarter. Redshirt freshman Evan Marshman replaced him and fared no better moving the ball down the field. Stakavage spent practice sidelined with a walking boot while Marshmann and true freshman Wiley Green worked with the first team offense in his place.

Jackson Tyner practiced with the second team offense. Bloomgen had said he would reopen the backup quarterback job prior to Stankavage’s injury. That has this case, but at this time all signs point to both Marshman and Green being ahead of Tyner. One of those two will be in line to make his first career start Saturday on the road.

Green had a strong fall camp and continues to play well in practice. He was considered to be a prime candidate for the newly instituted redshirt rule that allows players to play four games without forfeiting a year of eligibility. Bloomgren is going to do whatever it takes to win Saturday, so don’t expect to see a potential redshirt play a meaningful role in the decision making process.

Special teams

The first drills of practice focused on special teams. Even though Jack Fox racked up punt yardage in bunches the unit was far from excellent against UAB.

The most glaring issue came on a blocked up, recovered by UAB for a touchdown. That’s exactly where the team started, address any protection issues to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

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Execution woes continue to plague Owls

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Rice football has scored three points in their last eight quarters of play leaving the team’s poor execution the glaring culprit in the aftermath of a string of defeats.

For the second consecutive Saturday, the Rice offense was kept out of the endzone. The poor offensive showing against UAB came on the heels of a puzzling offensive performance against UTSA. At the heart of both losses was a critical failure: execution.

The coaches don’t run the plays. That somewhat obvious fact will be the source of several hard conversations taking place at South Main this weekend. It doesn’t matter how well the coaches prepare the team or how well the team understands the gameplan on any given week if they’re not able to step on the field on Saturday and put that knowledge into practice.

“That’s what you’re seeing.” Mike Bloomgren said as he leveled with the media following the game. “When you can’t block people in the run game … and when you can’t block long enough in pass protection, there’s not a whole lot you can do in this game.”

He wasn’t alone in his initial assessment. Linebacker Dylan Silcox said team lacked “proper execution” that resulted in big plays for the UAB offense. Freshman quarterback Evan Marshman, who saw his first action for the Owls on Saturday, echoed those sentiments. “I want to convert on third downs and I want to lead us on successful drives. Obviously, that didn’t happen,” he acknowledged.

The coaching staff, the defense and the offense all came away with the same message, albeit one that’s hard to take to swallow. There are players that continue to excel at their one-eleventh, the phrase Bloomgren used to stress the importance of every individual performance on any given play. They’re just not doing it together.

If there was a silver bullet this coaching staff would have fired it long ago. Instead, it’s back to the practice field and back to the X’s and O’s. Captain Zach Abercrumbia remarked during fall camp, this is Rice University. It’s not a question of if these players can understand the gameplan, it’s when. There’s no better time than the present.

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Owls offense shut out for first time since 2000 in loss to UAB

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Rice football dropped their Week 7 home contest to the UAB Blazers as the Owls’ offense was muted for the second week in a row and the defense surrendered a few big plays.

A week removed from a 3-point performance against UTSA the Owls’ offensive struggles continued against UAB. Things got worse against UAB. Rice football was shut out for the first since they lost 37-0 against No. 11 TCU in 2000, a span of 210 games.

Head coach Mike Bloomgren and his staff will once again be forced pick up the pieces after another disheartening loss which dropped the Owls to 1-6 overall and 0-3 in CUSA play. Here are some initial reactions from the loss.

1. The secondary is still getting beat deep

The UTSA game will more than likely prove to be the highwater mark for the season for the Rice secondary. That’s not to say this unit won’t have more days, but holding any team to under 50 yards passing is an extremely rare feat. Even knowing this week would more than likely feature a higher yardage total, the results were still frustrating.

Justin Bickham and Brandon Douglas-Dotson were both beat down the field for long touchdown passes. The secondary as a whole allowed several UAB receivers to get behind the last line of defense and were fortunate to some degree that they were either overthrown or not targeted.

The defense allowed 274 yards through the air and two passing touchdowns. Both were improvements from their season averages coming into the game, but each number could have been better … or much worse. Needless to say there will be plenty of film to watch and things to be corrected from this game. That goes for the front seven as well, who were equally unproductive against the run.

2. The offensive line remains out of sync

The offensive line is Mike Bloomgren’s area of expertise. Before being elevated to the offensive coordinator position at Stanford he was the offensive line coach and run game coordinator for the Cardinal. He has proven success in the trenches, but thus far the offensive line at Rice hasn’t been able to gel.

After hearing rumblings of potential changes throughout the week, Rice started the game with true freshman Jake Syptak at left tackle in place of Ozuma Osuji who had started the Owls’ previous six games. Joining him were Jack Greene, Shea Baker, Joseph Dill and Sam Pierce.

With just under seven minutes to play in the first quarter Rice found themselves in fourth and one. They went to the jumbo package, with all 11 players jammed into the middle. Jordan Meyers got the carry and went nowhere, turning the ball over on downs. That’s the kind of situation that Bloomgren lives for making it equally frustrating when the result was a short loss.

The unit struggled with pass protection too. UAB picked up three sacks and two quarterback hurries. Shawn Stankavage and Evan Marshman were decent when each had time to throw, averaging 10.5 yards per completion with a few nice balls thrown downfield by each of them. If the line does not improve the offense is not going to get much better.

3. Creative playcalling not enough to jump start the offense

Don’t miss the forest for the trees here. Offensive plays that pick up big yardage aren’t automatically “good play calling” and plays that result in negative results aren’t “bad play calling”. First and foremost, the Owls have an execution issue. Poor execution renders any sort of playcalling futile.

After a dismal offensive performance against UTSA the Rice offense needed some kind of spark. Credit is due to offensive coordinator Jerry Mack and the rest of coaching staff for coming up with some new wrinkles to add to the Owls’ repertoire on Saturday. The execution wasn’t there, not just on the new looks, but on the basic fundamentals of this offense.

Freshman running back Juma Otoviano saw his first action of the season, coming in as the Owls’ wildcat quarterback and picking up a few yards on the ground. Rice also incorporated a shovel pass, some creative reads and just about everything but the kitchen sink.

It’s clear that this offense is stuck in neutral and needs to figure out how to move the ball consistently. They didn’t find the answer against UAB, just like they didn’t figure things out against UTSA. There are a host of plays that the offensive staff is going to want back, but poor execution is just as much to blame as the playcalling, if not more so. The execution was so spotty on Saturday that even the better play calls fell flat.

4. It’s time to talk about the quarterbacks

The head coach and the quarterback get too much credit when a team wins and too much blame when the team loses. That’s never going to change, but it’s important to make a distinction between individual performances and collective offensive issues when evaluating quarterback play.

With that disclaimer, here are the stat lines for the Rice quarterbacks against UAB:

  • Stankavage: 7-for-12, 79 yards
  • Marshman: 6-for-16, 57 yards

All of the Rice quarterbacks spent as much time under duress as they did looking down the field. The fear of the oncoming pass rush was noticeable for Stankavage, who looked uncomfortable in the pocket from the start of this game.

It was another game in which Stankavage wasn’t awful, but didn’t show the same growth in the offense as he did early in this season. He just hasn’t progressed enough as a passer. That, combined with a struggling offense, had opened the door for someone else to take the reigns on offense. Bloomgren’s hand was forced, though, as Stankavage left this game in the first half before returning to the sideline with his left foot in a boot.

5. Final thoughts

It’s not fun to lose. Rice fans know that as well as anyone else in the country, and so does Bloomgren. If Rice wanted to try and catch lightning in a bottle with an up-and-coming coach they could have gone that route in the hiring process. Instead, they opted for Bloomgren. Someone who’s had tremendous amounts of success and recruited extremely well. He has a plan, a great coaching staff and he’s building for the long term.

Recruiting is just as much a part of a new coaching staff as installing an offense, defense and special teams. The talent at Rice needs to get better for the Owls to compete, and the coaching staff needs to continue to grow as well. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, and they’re not things that happen overnight. Grow pains hurt. They’re not fun, just like Saturday wasn’t fun, but they’re a part of the process.

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