Rice Football fell to Houston in their last chance to lay claim to the Bayou Bucket Trophy for sometime. The Owls are 1-1 on the season.

After soaring to a 1-0 start in the debut of head coach Scott Abell against Louisiana, Rice football came back to ground level on Saturday in a rivalry game defeat at the hands of the Houston Cougars. With no current games on the schedule between the two crosstown teams, Houston will hold on to the Bayou Bucket, for now. Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:

Pre-Injury Secondary Shows Out

In the season opener against Louisiana, it was the Rice football defensive line that stole the show. Cajuns’ quarterback Walker Howard barely completed 10 passes and was sacked three times. On Saturday against Houston, it was the secondary that made their bid for the most dominant unit on a stacked defensive side.

Corners Khary Crump and Omari Porter each had pivotal breakups that snuffed out Houston drives. Safety Jack Kane had a hit that separated his would-be receiver from the football and Porter closed out the next drive with a diving stop which was nearly picked off. And all of that happened in the first quarter.

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Rice did register three sacks, so the front did find success in this game too, but the secondary was on another level, providing Houston quarterback Conner Weigman with no clean looks and plenty of tight windows. Even on his most accurate balls, Rice defensive backs made plays on the ball and kept the Houston offense in neutral with six breakups spread across four defenders.

Weigman didn’t do serious damage through the air until a 74-yard touchdown pass in the fourth quarter. That score came against a backup corner following an injury to starter Khary Crump, who left the field on a prior series. That Rice was playing aggressively on the back end at the time given the two-score deficit didn’t help the situation. Crump’s injury will be one to monitor, but the secondary as a whole still played very well.

Offense Struggles with Cougars’ Front

While the defense delivered yet another masterclass, the offense took some time to get in gear. More than anything else, Houston’s athleticism proved much more arduous to overcome than anything the Owls had seen to this point. The Cougars routinely beat the Owls to the edges and kept contain, pushing the Rice offensive line inward and meeting ball carriers in the backfield.

Head coach Scott Abell seemed less phased by the talent differential than the Cougars’ approach.

“In the first half they came out in a defense we didn’t really prep for which is not abnormal for us, but in a year where we’re transitioning to a new system, we didn’t adjust very well,” Abell said. “They controlled the line of scrimmage because of that, that pretty much that whole first half.”

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Any advantages the Owls hoped to gain from their unique offensive attack were lessened by the Cougars’ ability to overcome a slower first step with speed and power. The Rice offense went three-and-out on its first three drives before it was able to adjust, pivoting to a more steady diet of screen passes to stretch the defense for it’s power running game on the inside.

“Last week we saw a defense that lined up how we prepped and it was clean,” Abell said. “Our guys executed really pretty well all game last week. This was almost a polar opposite. I didn’t think we excuted very well from the get-go. Even when we found momentum, we couldn’t keep it. We gotta figure that out and that starts with me.”

Rice would get on the board for the first time thanks to those deft modifications, cobbling together a 14-play, 47-yard drive, consummated by an Enoch Gota field goal. The Owls were making progress on the ensuing drive before being stopped short on fourth and one as running back D’Andre Hardeman was met in the backfield before he ever had a chance to make positive yardage.

Fortunately for Rice football, they won’t face many teams with this level of talent again this season. However, the Houston is a far cry from the upper-tier of talent in this sport. That Rice was able to move the ball on long scoring drives in the second and fourth quarters proves there’s more potential in this offense still untapped, but the level of consistency was far from adequate.

Limited Offense Leaves Little Room for Error

The sum total of the defensive dominance and offensive trudging nearly netted Rice football a halftime lead in their most coveted home contest of the season. Instead, fate would ensure it was Dean Connors — who spent the last three seasons donning Blue rather than Red in this rivalry game — who took a handoff 54 yards to paydirt in the final seconds of the first half.

What made twinge touchdown of Connors’ touchdown all the worse was the proceeding clock stoppage which may have subtly encouraged its coming. Following a facemask which set Houston back inside its own 20-yard line and an eight yard run. Rice head coach Scott Abell called a timeout with Houston facing second and 15. Rather than run the clock out and go into halftime down three, Houston pushed the ball, getting a first down at the 42-yard line. Connors scored three plays later.

Decisions like whether or not to call a timeout to get the ball back often get lost in the churn of variance that comes with every college football game. That the teams were separated by so small a difference than one breakaway play could be the difference.

If nothing else, it made Weigman’s nine-yard touchdown run in the third quarter made it clear a near-perfect game from other phases wasn’t going to be enough without some sort of pulse on offense. A pick-six off a deflected pass in the fourth made that emphatically clear. The final score made the game appear much more one-sided than it was for the majority of three-plus quarters, but the result speaks for itself.

1-1

Starting the 2025 season with games against a Sun Belt favorite and a Big XII team was a rude awakening for an offense still in its infancy, but it’s hard to deny a 1-1 start against the caliber of opponent the Owls have played to this point is anything other above par. Two touchdown underdogs in each game, that Rice was able to move through this stretch at .500 with a home-game looming against an FCS opponent is unequivocally a good start.

“If you would have asked me back in mid-August… I probably would have said okay,” Abell acknowledged. “But we weren’t [1-1], we were 1-0 and I’m really disappointed we’re not 2-0 because that’s the expectation. Are kids are disappointed and that score is not indicative of what that game was like.”

That Rice hired Abell for his offensive wizardry which has only produced 23 total points isn’t something he’s shying away from. Finding more consistency and more success becomes that more important as the season progresses.

“There’s your 10 Million Dollar question,” Abell said, addressing the quandary of replicating the offensive boost his team found briefly in the middle of the third quarter.

“We kinda went back to the basics. We kinda went back to the simple things that I though our guys could execute against a defense that we really hadn’t replicated in practice and encouraged them to play fast. And we did. We lined up in our base two formations. We played really fast there and kind of kept it simple and that’s what it looked like. Which is exciting, but we gotta be able to handle some complexity and that we did not handle tonight.”

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