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Rice Football: OLB Josh Pearcy signs UDFA deal with Los Angeles Rams

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Rice football did not see any players selected in the 2025 NFL Draft, but former outside linebacker Josh Pearcy has since signed with the Los Angeles Rams.

Pearcy was a mainstay for the Rice football defense over the course of six seasons on South Main. Initially beginning his tenure as a more traditional edge rusher with his hand in the dirt, Pearcy transitioned to more of an outside linebacker role over his final two seasons to showcase his versatility for NFL scouts.

While he wasn’t drafted Pearcy did impress enough to sign with the Los Angeles Rams as an undrafted free agent. Rice announced the news on social media Saturday evening.

More: 2024 Rice Football Iron Man — Josh Pearcy

On his way to the NFL, Pearcy left Rice in the top 10 all-time in sacks and tackles for a loss, racking up most of those totals in his final three seasons as a full-time starter. His former teammate, Brant Banks, signed with the Green Bay Packers.

Rice Football recent NFL Draft history

Luke McCaffrey was a second-day selection of the Washington Commanders last season, coming off the board at No. 100 overall. He was the first Owl drafted since the Houston Texans selected Christian Covington in the sixth round of the 2015 NFL Draft.

Prior to Covington’s selection, the Owls had sent a steady flow of pros to the next level. From 2009 to 2015 eight Rice football players were selected: Jarret Dillard (2009), James Casey (2009), Cheta Ozougwu (2011), Scott Solomon (2012), Vance McDonald (2013), Luke Wilson (2013), Phillip Gaines (2014), Christian Covington (2015). McDonald was the highest selection, going No. 55 overall to the San Francisco 49ers.

** Photo credit: Maria Lysaker **
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Rice Football squanders fourth-quarter lead in loss Charlotte

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Rice Football had their chances to put the game away against Charlotte, but couldn’t close when it mattered most. The Owls are 1-4.

A 10-0 halftime lead was not enough as Rice football fell by a single point to Charlotte at home on Saturday night. In the final two minutes, Rice had chances to win the game on offense, but couldn’t convert a third and short. They had a chance to win on defense, but allowed a go-ahead touchdown in the final minute. They had the chance to win with special teams, but a last-second kick sailed wide.

“I think I’ve given this speech a few too many times this year,” Bloomgren said at the podium following the Owls’ fourth loss in five games. “We performed better than we have been, but when the crunch time was here in that fourth quarter we failed in all three phases and Charlotte made more plays.”

Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:

Trust your playmakers and let them produce

In the highest leverage moments, it’s the stars that have to shine. For Rice football right now, that means the most critical offensive moments should involve Dean Connors and EJ Warner and/or Matt Sykes. They’re not the only talented playmakers on this offense but that trio has largely been at the forefront when that offense is moving the ball well.

Warner overshot a makeable touchdown pass to Sykes on the Owls’ first possession but redeemed himself soon afterward with a nice dish to Jackson for the opening score. Connors had more rushing yards on his first touch of the game than Charlotte did in the entire first quarter.

Now, this reality comes with a very real, and very important caveat: your playmakers have to produce.

Warner hasn’t overcome his tendency to elevate throws downfield. He overshot Sykes on multiple third downs in the first half. Sykes was better this week than he was against Army a week ago, but his lack of consistency has been part of what’s gummed this offense up at times. Both have played better as the season progresses, but each would (correctly) admit they have room to grow.

Dean Connors has been and continues to be the most valuable man on this side of the ball. He only touched the ball seven times in the first half; that’s not enough. He finished with 16 touches for the game and 135 yards of total offense. Your best offensive weapon — and Connors is most certainly that — needs more of the ball.

“We got other good backs. We don’t want to just wear Dean out. If you tell me Dean is going to get 20 to 30 touches every game, that’s probably the right number,” Bloomgren said after the game. “16 total touches? Would you wanna program a few more for him? Absolutely. He’s a really good player, but the flow of the game was going the way it was.”

Rice does have other good backs, but 16 is not 30. It’s not 20 either.

Rice racked up 463 yards of total offense, their highest total against an FBS opponent yet this season. It’s not a particularly impressive number on the whole, but it’s a step in the right direction. Those playmakers have to get things going if this offense is ever going to come close to the ceiling it’s shown in previous years.

Bring out the depth

So much of the discourse this offseason around the Rice football roster centered on the depth the Owls’ had accumulated in Bloomgren’s seventh season. Unfortunately, the only way to truly evaluate that depth is to have it forced into action. The results have been mixed when former twos and threes have been thrown into the first with the first units this season, but Saturday’s win against Charlotte probably doesn’t happen without some important contributions from former backups being asked to step up.

The offense line, featuring just two players in the same position they played on opening day, consistently opened up holes for the running game. Both Dean Connors and Taji Atkins got to the second level on plays that were blocked well. Although he took a few shots, Warner wasn’t sacked.

Likewise, the defense churned out some big plays from lesser-known faces. Peyton Stevenson and made consecutive plays to help stonewall a Charlotte drive in the second quarter. Daveon Hook led the team in tackles. Mutombo had the interception and followed it with a sack. None of those three were on the two-deep against Sam Houston in Week 1.

The go-ahead fourth quarter touchdown was scored by Elijah Mojarro, who wouldn’t have been on the field had Boden Groen been healthy.

Obviously, the Owls would love to have as many of their starters back on the field as possible. A bye week with extra rest will help those efforts, but even if reinforcements do arrive, this depth matters. Especially if Rice wants to make good on some of their preseason aspirations and get things turned around.

Unfortunately, the reliance on depth has it’s downsides too. Kicker Enoch Gota missed his first do-or-die attempt of his young career, turning what could have been a celebratory night into another painful defeat.

The defense gets some of its swagger back

The Rice offense got a big play from Dean Connors but didn’t put any points on the board in the first quarter, turning the ball over inside the redzone and punting on their ensuing possession. That put the onus on the defense to make sure they kept their team in the game.

Aided by favorable field position on a few occasions, the defense delivered one of their better starts to a game this season. Blake Boenisch didn’t suit up on Saturday, but the Owls still held Charlotte to 1.2 yards per carry in the first quarter. The safety room was as depleted as it’s ever been under head coach Mike Bloomgren, but they limited Charlotte quarterback Trexler Ivey to 5-of-10 passing for 35 yards on the 49ers’ first three offensive series.

The Charlotte never got in gear under Trexler Ivey. When they did finally get the ball across the 50-yard line midway through the second quarter they were swiftly turned away by this interception from defensive lineman Joseph Mutombo, who has seen an elevated role in the defense partly because of the slew of injuries in front of him.

Charlotte finally found life under backup quarterback Deshawn Purdie, who connected on three deep passes, all of which resulted in scoring drives. That was essentially it for the Charlotte attack. Three plays. But it was enough.

As the offense works through its challenges in real time, more and more pressure is going to be put on this defense to win games. On Saturday against a woeful Charlotte offense, they came close enough but got little help from the other phases. If they can translate that to more talented opponents, Rice is going to have a fighting chance to win some games, but they’re the last bastion of hope for a team that’s hurting.

Losing on the Margin

A fourth down pass interference call against Sean Fresch changed the outcome of this game. A block in the back penalty on the ensuing possession might very well have swung the outcome, too. Both plays exemplified the dangerous tightrope Rice Football attempted to walk in this game. Rice let a bad Charlotte team stick around to the point where one blown coverage could shift the result of the game.

The best teams in the sport create margin. You can afford a bust on any particular play or phase of the game when there’s a buffer to cover those shortcomings. When you’re stuck in a one-score game, every mistake matters. Teams with more faults make more mistakes. There’s some truth to the old adage that good teams stay good and bad teams stay bad.

This is a bad football team right now.

One that, in Bloomgren’s own words “failed in all three phases” to one of the few teams left in the country that had yet to beat an FBS opponent. It’s hard to imagine a lower point than this in a season that was supposed to be a breakthrough campaign. Picked to finish in the thick of a competitive AAC, Rice football sits dead last in the standings and they have yet to play UTSA, Tulane, Memphis or South Florida.

This is a team out of excuses and out of answers. There’s a lot of soul-searching to be done during this bye week from everyone in the program. This isn’t how this season was supposed to go.

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Fourth and the Woe Zone

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Rice Football 2024: Charlotte Game Week Practice Report

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Rice football takes on Charlotte this week with eyes on a bounce-back win. Here’s what we learned from the Owls at practice this week.

It’s midseason and injuries are starting to take a toll on the Rice football roster. The Owls have made a lot of adjustments to counteract those personnel losses this week and keep tweaking the offense as they go. How much improvement can they make in a short window of time as they face a must-win game against Charlotte on Saturday.

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Can I get a safety, please?

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Rice Football smothered in Bayou Bucket loss to Houston

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Rice Football fell behind early and never threatened to catch up, ceding the Bayou Bucket to Houston after a one-year sojourn at South Main.

It had been more than 20 years since Rice football had claimed the Bayou Bucket in successive seasons. That streak will continue for quite some time longer after Saturday’s loss at TDECU Stadium. There’s one game left in the series as things stand and Rice can’t wait for another shot to redeem themselves from a rough outing in their biggest rivalry matchup. Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:

Going Sideways

Notwithstanding their big day on the scoreboard against Texas Southern, the Rice football offense has struggled to move the ball north and south this season. They’ve largely been a horizontal offense utilizing their speed to the edges to outflank their opponents and slowly matriculate their way down the field. When you’re playing a less talented opponent, that works. When you’re playing a Big 12 team that is just as athletic as you are if not more so, it’s impossible. Rice found that out the hard way, early on.

The first three plays from scrimmage were a Dean Connors run off left tackle followed by a swing pass to Connors off the left side and then a flat out to Boden Groen. They gained seven yards and punted. EJ Warner was under a decent amount of pressure early but misfired on most of his shots down the field. Rice didn’t get any points from their offense until there were 68 seconds left in regulation.

Against FCS competition, Rice has scored 69 points. Against FBS foes the Owls have mustered just 21 in twice as many quarters.

If there was a weak link, it was hard to identify. Warner missed some receivers downfield, the protection regularly failed to give him time to work and the receivers did not generate nearly enough separation. There were moments when everything seemed to come together, but the passing game was flat and horizontal making it near impossible to sustain any meaningful drive.

Rice had one snap on the plus side of the 50 in the first half and seven such plays in the second half. They were 2-for-13 on third down. For an offense, it doesn’t get much worse than this.

The personnel is the personnel. The staff is the staff. They’ve got to figure something out, fast.

Defense staves off a massacre

In hindsight, leading the nation in sacks through two games should have been the clear indicator that this current iteration of Rice football would be led by its defense. A tough opening quarter, which included 35 total yards from the offense and a punt return score, would have been so much worse if the defense hadn’t picked up the slack.

Josh Pearcy added to that sack total on the opening drive, although that takedown probably could have been credited to a few Owls, which is a testament to just how dominant the front seven has been so far this season.

The defense was burned for a handful of chunk plays but largely limited the backbreaking Houston punches to a pair of long first-quarter runs by Re’Shaun Sanford and a screen touchdown following a special teams mistake. A 37-yard run up the gut by Donovan Smith was the cherry on top of a garbage time sundae.

Forced to carry the load for the totality of the game, the defense added three sacks to their total and did a reasonable job containing Houston quarterback Donovan Smith and the Cougars’ rushing attack, which tried its best to drain the clock as quickly as it could. It might not have been a great day from the defense as a whole, but this phase of the ball wasn’t the reason Rice lost on Saturday.

Special teams roulette

Many of the largest swings in this game came in the sometimes overlooked third phase of football. Houston’s second touchdown was a 75-yard punt return touchdown. A few series later, a muffed punt by Sean Fresch was followed by a 44-yard touchdown from the Cougars on the very next play.

The Owls’ punt return woes didn’t stop there. Tyson Thompson, Fresch’s replacement, was leveled on his first return, putting the ball on the deck. Fortunately, Rice recovered and was aided further by a targeting penalty on the Cougars. The Owls were only in need of being bailed out because Thompson failed to signal for a fair catch, perhaps hoping to make the most of a rare opportunity.

While so many of his teammates struggled, Rice punter Alex Bacchetta was a bright spot on Saturday night at TDECU Stadium. Bacchetta punted seven times in the first half and two more in the second. The Rice football program record is 12 punts in one contest, most recently achieved by Jack Fox in 2018.

Bacchetta had one bad boot, a 24-yard on his first touch of the game. The remainder of his kicks were booming blasts. He averaged 42.2 yards per punt, 44.2 yards apiece when excluding the first dud. He was superb, but special teams on a whole were way too erratic in the moments that mattered most.

Behind schedule

Beating Houston would have gotten the Owls to 2-1, par for the season according to oddsmakers, with a marquee win and a rivalry trophy retained. The loss, while not unexpected from a spread standpoint, officially puts Rice behind expectations with a road trip to Army looming.

Picked to finish in the middle of the AAC, presumably with another bowl trip in tow, it’s time to officially put all of those aspirations on hold. Rice could very well achieve both of those objectives, but the team that was talked about as a dark horse to contend for the AAC title quite frankly hasn’t shown up to play in this season. Beating an FCS squad is nice, but the remainder of the schedule is against FBS opponents, against which Rice is 0-2.

Maybe things would feel a bit more hopeful if Rice had found a way to not stub their toe in their opening game against Sam Houston, but right now this is a team with more questions than answers and there are still two more games to play before the first bye week of the season.

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Rice Football sputters against Sam Houston in disappointing home opener

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After a summer of hope, Rice Football spent all its goodwill in an opening night loss to Sam Houston that never seemed as close as the score suggests.

Any illusions of a storybook season on South Main were shattered quickly on Saturday night. Rice football dropped its season opener to a Sam Houston State team the Owls had historically dominated, winning 16 of the 17 previous contests. That history couldn’t save the Owls this time around who fell to 0-1 in their seventh season under head coach Mike Bloomgren.

Bloomgren didn’t hide from the obviously disappointing result. “I apologize to our fans. I thought our game day atmosphere was really good from the first Owl Walk ever to all the things that people outside of this team control,” he said. “They were about as good as they can be and we didn’t do our part tonight.”

Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:

Sputtering from the start

Even with a few key transfers missing, Rice football couldn’t have gotten off to a much worse start to the season. The offensive line was overwhelmed early by the Sam Houston front, putting quarterback EJ Warner under pressure and providing little in the way of running room for the Owls’ backs. The first four Rice drives yielded 10 total yards and a pick-six.

The degree to which a Conference USA defensive line was able to push Rice around was concerning. There wasn’t much time to test the Bearkats downfield, allowing their entire defense to creep in and contributing, at least in part, to that crushing pick-six on the Owls’ third possession.

The defense faired slightly better, but not much. A busted coverage allowed Sam Houston a walk-in 67-yard touchdown. Then, already trailing by two scores, they let Sam Houston nickel and dime them down the field to make the deficit 17-0. A veteran team that was about a 10-point favorite looked shell-shocked before the first-quarter buzzer had ever sounded.

The first play of the second quarter? A missed field goal. Offense, defense and special teams all came out flat. That’s not how this game was supposed to go.walk

Three more quarters would ensue, but the gist of head coach Mike Bloomgren’s postgame synopsis was already begun to take form. “This is a team butt-whipping,” he said, after first crediting Sam Houston’s performance. “They took us out to the woodshed and beat the heck out of us and we’ve got to respond. We can’t put that kind of product on the field ever again.”

A tale of two lines

The defensive lines from both teams earned their keep on Saturday night. Although it was far from a defensive clinic on the Rice side, the pass rush did its job. Rice racked up seven sacks from seven different players. Charlie Looes stepped in for Coleman Coco and looked very much the part, impacting the game from his first series in blue and grey, tying for the team lead with 1.5 tackles for loss.

Sam Houston’s long touchdown passes weren’t slowly developing plays. Both featured quick shots deep downfield in which the Rice defensive back just got beat, either because of a miscommunication in coverage or a lost foot race. It’s hard to put either of those shots on the defensive line, which for the most part, made life extremely hard for quarterback Hunter Watson when he tried to throw the ball.

When the teams switched sides, the same reality was evident. The Sam Houston defensive line dominated a Rice front that was supposed to be revamped, featuring veteran tackles and hand-picked transfers on the interior. The Owls had zero running game and quarterback EJ Warner did almost all of his work under duress.

“Our offensive line, that is not the product we expect to put out there,” Bloomgren assessed.

Sam Houston ranked 124th in the nation in sacks last season. They added a few transfers to beef up the defensive line, but it’s not as if they brought in a bevy of blue chippers headed for the NFL. They sacked Warner two times, registering four official hurries and putting him off his spot too many times to count. A blistering shot in the final minutes of the game had Warner hobbling to the sideline as the Owl faithful held their collective breath.

The degree to which Rice struggled against an opponent that was not as talented on the line as others they fared before suggests this might have more to do with scheme than talent. If so, that’s a silver lining. Scheme can be analyzed and fix from game one to game two. Talent is what it is. Hopefully for the Owls, the first was the culprit on Saturday night.

The EJ Warner of it all

In desperate need of a pulse, EJ Warner took control. The first sparks of life came from two throws down the field, the first to Braylen Walker and the next to Matt Sykes. That drive would stall, but Warner would make a nifty play on the next sequence, throwing across his body as he rolled out to move the chains. He found Kobie Campbell in the endzone three players later to finally get Rice football on the board.

Given the pressure he was working under, Warner faired fairly well in his Rice debut. He completed 27 of 44 passes for 227 yards. He threw one touchdown and two interceptions, although the second was an afterthought with the game result well in hand.

Bloomgen seemed to concur, suggesting not all the fault fell on Warner’s shoulders. “I’m not sure he had time to play like he’s capable of playing,” Bloomgren said.”

Had he not been on the field, things likely would have gone much worse for the home team. We’ve seen what happens to a good team without a quarterback in recent years around South Main. At the very least, Warner showcased himself to be AAC-caliber, not something that can be said for every position on this team right now.

The defense had their gaffes. The running game was non-existent (2.6 yards per carry against a team that allowed 4.3 yards per carry a year ago). Warner and the pass rush were the positives from a night filled with horrors for the hometown crowd.

What it means

This team was talking about contending for a conference championship throughout the offseason and into fall camp. Those aspirations can officially be put on pause until they figure out some glaring issues from their season opener. Was this the seemingly annual hiccup where Rice got beat by an inferior opponent and they’ll be ready to go next week? It’s possible. But there’s not a lot from what we saw on the field Saturday to suggest this team is AAC-ready.

It doesn’t really matter if Sam Houston is improved, and to what degree they’ve progressed in their second season at the FBS level. This game was meant to be the game where the Owls established they’d taken the next step on a long-enduring build. Getting to six wins, or more, starts with winning home games you’re favored in by more than a touchdown. It doesn’t mean the Owls can’t rebound, but they’ve opened the door for questions that wouldn’t have been there if they’d just found a way to mozy to a boring 21-17 win.

The Texas Southern game can’t come soon enough. And fortunately for Rice, Houston looked just as embarrassing in their opening game against UNLV. This season is far from over and there are some manageable games ahead. But if there wasn’t a fire under this team and this coaching staff coming into the year, there’d better be now. Winning every game was never in the cards, but losing like that can’t happen again.

“We’re gonna watch the film. It’s going to suck watching it,” captain Josh Pearcy said after the game. “But, you know, we’ll treat it with that next play mentality and move on the next week.”

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