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Rice Football Recruiting: O-Line class steady after late-summer decommit

July 29, 2019 By Matthew Bartlett

The 2020 Rice Football recruiting class suffered a blow over the weekend, but one decommitment won’t shake what the Owls are building.

More: Complete list of 2020 Rice Football commits

In what has become a rare occurrence for the Owls under Mike Bloomgren, offensive lineman Brady Feeney decommited from the 2020 Rice Football Recruiting class over the weekend. Even with his abscence, the Owls incoming class ranks among the best of their peers. Rice has the No. 3 class in Conference USA and the No. 72 class in the nation with days remaining before fall camp begins on August 1.

Houston we don’t have a problem

Feeney’s departure is disappointing, but it’s not a sign of any significant problem in the ranks. The Owls remain confident for a number of reasons. First, this situation hasn’t proven to be an area of concern. In the past two recruiting cycles (2019 and 2020), four players have decommitted from Rice:

Feeney left the fold, committing to Indiana on Sunday
One reached a mutual understanding with the coaching staff that the Owls weren’t the right fit
An east coast cornerback flipped to Vanderbilt from Rice last September. He was committed for less than a month.
One of the Owls’ 2019 quarterback targets fell back into an offer during the early signing period to play for Buffalo, a local team with connections to his family

Altogether Rice brought in 40 players with their 2019 class. They have a little more than a dozen in the 2020 group, and counting. Rice doesn’t have a decommitment problem — and that’s a sign of a strong culture which players don’t want to leave.

Rice Football Season Preview — Buy Now | 2019 Rice Preview

More in the pipeline

Feeney first caught the Owls’ eye at a Stanford camp when coach Mike Bloomgren was working out west. He’s a good player who will be missed, but he projected as a guard at the next level, a position not as important for Rice right now as an outside man.

The Owls’ already have two guys in the wings ready to fill that tackle role, commits Trey Phillippi and Cole Latos. Both players are raw, ulta-athletic types with the physical frame ready for the college game. From a size and measurables perspective, they’re ready to hold down a side on the Owls’ offensive line.

Phillippi is a converted tight end and Latos can play both sides of the ball. They’ve yet to log a ton of film at the tackle spot, allowing the Owls’ to get in early and bring them on board. They’re raw talents with tremendous upside, fitting the position of greatest need for Rice on the offensive line.

Feeney’s decommitment wasn’t good news, but the future of Rice Football recruiting remains rock solid.

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Rice Football: Owls seek answers during fall camp

July 28, 2019 By Matthew Bartlett

Rice Football is set to begin fall camp on August 1 marking the unofficial end of the offseason. It’s finally time for offseason questions to be answered.

There were plenty of question marks when Mike Bloomgren’s staff took the reigns for their first fall camp last season. The staff had been through spring ball, but the weeks leading up to the regular season were supposed to be the time for the team to get answers.

Some questions were resolved rather quickly. Shawn Stankavage wasn’t named the outright starter during camp, but it the staff finalized that decision soon after the season began. The running back rotation was set with Emmanuel Esukpa taking the bulk of the carries, complimented by the speed and versatility of Austin Walter. Veterans in the secondary were trusted to start the season, even though several of them would quickly be replaced.

Fast-forward one more season and Rice finds themselves in a similar situation. No quarterback has been named the starter, yet, and the running back hierarchy is still up in the air. The secondary is more defined, at least by name, but the proven production isn’t there.

If you want a sneak peek at how those positions look entering camp, purchase our 2019 Rice Football Season Preview.

This year Rice has the benefit of experience. With the exception of some incoming transfers, the players being evaluated to fill the open roles understand what will be asked of them, both during camp and this fall. They know the scheme and their responsibilities in it. That should, in theory, make the process of selecting starters and preparing for the season more streamlined than it was a year ago.

Rice is going to be young again in 2019, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be inexperienced. In time, the Owls will have their answers.

Have questions? Join the discussion on the forum.

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Rice Football Recruiting: Owls committed to a national recruiting scope

July 26, 2019 By Matthew Bartlett

Rice Football Recruiting goes well beyond the campus at South Main. The Owls have stretched across the nation in search of the best talent.

Rice isn’t like most other in-state schools. For one, the academic rigor necessary to earn admittance at South Main is extremely high. The Owls acceptance rates for both athletes and non-athletes are stringent.

In order for the Rice Football team to reach a similar caliber of athlete the Owls have widened their scope significantly, especially since Mike Bloomgren signed his first recruits in the winter of 2017. Here’s a breakdown of the Owls’ current class tiers by states.

The vast majority of the sophomores and all of the freshmen and 2020 commits were recruited by Bloomgren and his staff. It’s no accident the reach has expanded significantly since his arrival. The Owls still heavily recruit Texas, but they’re reaching well past the Lone Star State as well.

The senior class also includes three grad transfers, originally from Texas, who played their college ball elsewhere. When taking that into consideration, roughly 60 percent of the players Bloomgren recruited are from Texas, down a considerable portion from the upperclassmen recruited by the previous staff.

The expanded reach isn’t limited to out-of-state recruiting. Rice Football recruiting is expanding its reach within Texas, too. Each of the Owls’ most recent signing classes has contained fewer great Houston area recruits than the class before it. The current sophomore, freshmen and incoming recruiting classes boasts eight, seven and four members from the greater Houston area, respectively.

If geography was a limiting factor toward on-field success before, it isn’t anymore. Rice football has recruited from Connecticut to California and seemingly everywhere in between. If there is a talented football player with the intellect to get into Rice, this coaching staff is going to find him.

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Rice Football: Mike Bloomgren, Rice still in prep mode

July 25, 2019 By Matthew Bartlett

If the Rice Football program was a five-course meal the Owls are somewhere in the middle of prep mode. There are spices being mixed on one counter, a variety of cheeses on another and a big piece of steak being aged to perfection in the center of the kitchen. There’s a cookbook, a guide to how to assemble the varied ingredients into one cohesive, delicious meal, but the cook has only just begun his preparations.

That cook is Mike Bloomgren and he’s committed to the deliberate art that both cooking and rebuilding a football program requires. “We are a work in progress. We won’t make any secrets about that,” Bloomgren told his audience at the annual Texas High School Coaches Association Convention this week.

“Year Two is so much better than Year Zero. Everything is better.” — Mike Bloomgren

In a sport where failure can lead to dismissal, not many coaches speak as boldly as Bloomgren — at least not outside the walls of their own office. But Bloomgren is different, in part because he hasn’t taken his eyes off his cookbook since day one. He’s not pretending to be serving the full meal, not yet. Rather, the work being done behind the scenes to get there is progressing well.

Instead of hand-holding and the basics, not that the staff was limited in that capacity at all last season, Bloomgren can ask bigger questions. “This is how we did it last year. It wasn’t excellent. Can we make it better?” In most respects, Rice expects they can. For Bloomgren, the hope lies in that preparation that’s already been put in place. “The staff knows what I expect day-to-day. The kids know what to expect day-to-day.” Now comes the time to implement.

It’s the same story Bloomgren has been telling for over a year. The promise of the finished product lingers in the air floating anxiously over South Main. As much as the world demands instant results, some things can’t be rushed — every good cook knows that.

Consider this another pallet cleansing table-setter. Let the words of Bloomgren be the foundation through which you consume the 2019 season: “Year Two is so much better than Year Zero. Everything is better.”

Rice is bringing in 40 new players this fall including 10 transfers with 200+ games of college football experience. The players already on campus, the names people know, are bought into every minute detail of Bloomgren’s vision. Let the process run its course.

Read more about Bloomgren’s process and the groundwork laid in 2018 in our Rice Football Season Preview. Here’s a sample on the feature story…

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Rice Football: Owls hope to flip script with win in 2019 road opener

July 24, 2019 By Matthew Bartlett

It’s been a while since Rice Football opened the season with a road win, but that’s exactly what the Owls hope to accomplish against Army on August 30, 2019.

In 2000 and 2001 Rice Football won a pair of hard-fought thrilling openers against rival Houston. The first came at Rice Stadium with the Owls prevailing in triple overtime. The next came by a touchdown on the Cougars’ home turf. Since then Rice has come struggled out of the gate when they play away from home.

Rice fell to current head coach Mike Bloomgren’s Stanford Cardinal at the beginning of the 2018 season. The Owls’ last true road opener came against Western Kentucky in 2016. Rice lost that one 46-14. You have to go back to 1991, when Rice opened the season on the road on September 14th at Northwestern, to find the Owls most recent road opening win outside the city of Houston.

Things have been different at home. Rice has won three of their last four home openers at Rice Stadium. They’ve split their last two neutral site starts at NRG Stadium, where they’ll play later this year against Texas.

Rice won’t have the luxury of a home game to kick off 2019 when they travel to West Point to play Army. The Black Knights won the last two contests in the series with Rice football taking the four games previous to that. The Owls lead the all-time series 4-3-1.

This 2019 Army team is going to be a tough out. Check out our full deep dive on Army, including their top players to watch, a thorough depth chart breakdown and the most pressing questions about their upcoming season in our 2019 Rice Football Season Preview. We’re offering the Army preview as a free sample, just click the preview button in the top right corner of the page. Like what you see? Please consider buying a copy and learning more about the Owls and their opponents this upcoming season.