Next up for Rice football, a road game against South Florida. Here’s what head coach Scott Abell had to say about the matchup and a few depth chart notes.

Head coach Scott Abell and a set of players met with the media for their customary weekly availability. They recapped the North Texas game and looked ahead at their upcoming matchup with South Florida.

We touch on those items, then dig into the Rice football depth chart and what the team looks like heading into the weekend. First, the quotes:

Press Conference Quotes

We’re still learning how to handle the ebb and flow of a game. Offensively, I’ll speak on that because I think both sides handle things differently. Offensively when the rollercoaster goes downhill and a drive stalls, we let that impact us mentally more than we should. That is why I say I think we held ourselves back offensively Saturday and the key is not to do that this week. The key is we need to make them defend all parts of the offense. – Rice Football head coach Scott Abell on the growth of the offense

We’ve played an incredible schedule. We don’t go into this game intimidated. It’s just to me, we’re playing another Top 25 caliber program. I can list them all. We start Louisiana at the beginning of the year was being touted as a top 30 program to UConn, to Memphis, to North Texas and now here we go to South Florida. We’ve been battle tested and I’m excited now to see, here we are game 12, playing for the opportunity to go to a bowl game and what will we learn from all those tests throughout the year.” Rice Football head coach Scott Abell on being battle tested

I do think one of the differences will be, they have one of the best players in the country at quarterback. What makes him so dangerous in who he is is his ability to hurt you with his legs and his arm. That’s different than last week. Last week, very comfortable just standing in the pocket and getting rid of it quick. No really quarterback run game. This week it’ll be more quarterback run game and the passing game probably isn’t that diverse, not quite as exotic, because of the quarterback run game with that and to me, that’s the key. We need to make them one-handed on that side of the football. To do that, you’ve got to control the line of scrimmage and you’ve got to tackle him well, which is a really big challenge, but that’s our challenge.- Rice Football head coach Scott Abell on the USF offense

Putting it all together, man, what an opportunity for us. I think if we can do that – and we’re better in a lot of areas than we were week one, we’ve grown so much, but then there’s some areas because of injuries or season and stuff that we’re still trying to search for answers for – but if we can put it all together, man, what an exciting Saturday. We want to make them uncomfortable. WE want to get them in the fourth quarter. And that opportunity is there if we can now establish ourselves, play four really good quarters of football in all phases. And that’s what it’s going to take. We’ve seen all phases be really good this year. It would be nice and it would be imperative for all of our three phases to be in sync, play quality football at the same time Saturday in South Florida. – Rice Football head coach Scott Abell on what it will take to win on Saturday

Everything jumps out. They’re flaying to the ball. They’re playing for each other. They’re playing with a lot of pride. They’re still trying to fight for a conference championship, so you see the effort out there, it jumps out. They’re front seven is good. DBs can run. They can tackle as well. I think for us, it’s just going out there like every week, matching their intensity, matching their physicality. But they’re a good team. They’re still fighting for a conference championship and even the College Football Playoff so we know we’re going to get their best effort. We gotta go out there and play our game, like we did last week but we gotta take the punches and we gotta throw punches back. – Running back Quinton Jackson on USF

He’s really able to use his legs really well so we just wanna focus on containing the quarterback, pressing the pocket and just making throws difficult for him because we know he’s a dual threat. We want to make sure that he doesn’t affect the game with his legs. – Defensive lineman Tony Anyanwu on USF QB Byrum Brown

Full Press Conference

Depth Chart

Depth Chart Notes

There was one change to the depth chart this week, the removal of Braylen Walker. As The Roost reported last week, Walker was expected to miss the remainder of the regular season, so this change was not unexpected and is more reflective of how that room has looked over the course of the last several weeks.

Any other adjustments will likely be injury-related or driven by the subtle schematic shifts the Owls employ for this game. We’ll cover those in depth on this week’s practice report, available to those subscribed to our Starting Lineup Tier on Patreon, which should be out later this week.

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