The 2020 Rice Football season is cloaked in uncertainty, but playing in the spring is unlikely to be the answer for the Owls.
Over the past several months I’ve had conversations with several folks about the feasibility of spring football. Should Rice football not play a fall season, could they play later in the academic year? The answer: it’s theoretically possible, but unlikely.
I’ll start with something that most everyone I’ve spoken to at Rice seems to agree with. If a fall season can be played, that’s the best option.
Plan A, if you were to call it such, would enable Rice to play for a conference championship. That would be the closest semblance to a “normal” schedule the Owls could achieve. Rice has already chopped that “normal” down to a slightly less recognizable “familiar”, but the general theme remains.
Moving to the spring would bring with it a new set of challenges that go beyond whatever the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic were at that point.
It’s hard to count on relief from other conferences. The Big Ten announced today they’re going to attempt a fall season after all. The Pac-12, which (as of now) is not playing this fall, could reconsider too.
Unless the Mountain West or the MAC choose to have multiple schools make Rice their non-conference game in a hypothetical spring slate, the pickings for opponents will be slim to none.
Without any conference affiliated opponents, a spring slate might not be plausible. Rice’s best-case scenario might be two home-and-homes with New Mexico State and Old Dominion. That might be better than no season at all, but the optics certainly don’t look great. For those reasons, the focus remains squarely on playing this fall.
