Rice football has seen spurts of winning spanning more than a century of competition, but they’ve struggled to find sustained success. Can that change any time soon?
Beyond reaching the mountaintop and bringing home conference championships, new Rice football head coach will be tasked with one primary objective: consistency. Rice is entering its 105th season of college football. In that span, they’ve had 46 seasons in which they finished .500 or better.
Reaching 6-6 should be this program’s baseline. They’ll have better years and win some conference titles. They’ll have worse years and struggle to 3 or 4 wins. But by and large, they should be averaging somewhere around seven .500 seasons every decade. That level of consistency hasn’t existed at Rice since the 1950’s and the end of the Jess Neely era.
In the decades following the Owls haven’t stayed close to .500 for long:
| Decade | .500+ seasons |
| 2010’s | 3 |
| 2000’s | 3 |
| 1990’s | 4 |
| 1980’s | 0 |
| 1970’s | 2 |
| 1960’s | 3 |
Since 1960, Rice football has won 35.6 percent of their games. The good ‘ol days were good, but finding a way to tread water will be a tremendous accomplishment in itself. That takes investment, and that’s something that the university has taken seriously since the arrival of athletic director Joe Karlgaard. Bringing in a respected coordinator and recruiter like Bloomgren speaks volume’s about his intentionality and the focus on rebuilding Rice into what it once was.
Winning cures all ailments. And the administration has put a staff in place which they believe can reach that end goal — it just might be a messy process. Rice has been down for longer than many would like to admit. Despite a few positive blips on the radar, there’s plenty of work to be done. Bloomgren and his group will be given time to rebuild the program in the way they best see fit, but they’ll truly be starting from square one.
