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Rice Football: Bowl hopes dashed as WKU overwhelms Owls

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An important game got away from Rice Football quickly as Western Kentucky poured on the points to officially eliminate Rice from bowl eligibility.

Just about any Rice football fan would have happily accepted a one-score game against Western Kentucky after the first quarter. That’s exactly where the Owls found themselves in this one, even possessing the ball at midfield as the clock started to run on the second period. Then the bottom seemingly fell out.

Mistakes, turnovers and errant passes saw a close game turn into a blowout with remarkable speed. By the time the clock hit zeroes and both teams headed back to their locker rooms for halftime, the deficit had reached 28 points, with the Hilltoppers blanking the home team. The second half seemed like a formality at that point, with Western Kentucky coasting to the win. Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:

Making (and losing) their own luck

At the risk of oversimplifying what has been a very sporadic season, the first 12 minutes of the Owls’ game against Western Kentucky felt like a decent synopsis. Western Kentucky moved down the field almost effortlessly, gliding into the redzone for what looked might be the opening score.

Then a bad snap and questionable decision by Bailey Zappe opened the door for Naeem Smith to step in front of a low pass and for a turnover. Given an opportunity to take the lead, the Rice offense marched down the field into the redzone on a long drive that burned more than six minutes off the clock.

The August Pitre fumbled what would have been a first down reception inside the five-yard line and WKU took over. The Hilltoppers drove 97-yards for their first touchdown on the subsequent possession.

The Roost Podcast: Stay tuned for the game recap this week – Rice football vs WKU 

Rice made a big play. They had a golden opportunity to tilt the game into their favor and executed extremely well for a meaningful duration. Then, when it looked like Rice football might have set themselves up for success, disaster struck.

From “oh no!” to “yes!” to “oh no!” all in the span of three relatively short drives. A potential 7-0 Rice lead flipped to a 7-0 Rice deficit in a matter of minutes. And Rice made good plays on both sides of the ball to get them close. To start the second quarter the Rice defense forced a three-and-out. Not long after Rice punter Charlie Mendes misfired for a net of 14 yards. One step forward, another step back.

Unforced errors are stacking up

The special teams woes have been just as surprising as the defensive regression. Every week there’s an unflattering moment (or two, or three) to write home about for a unit that was among the most efficient in the country in the early years of Bloomgren’s tenure. The Rice special teams unit ranked 124th out of 130 teams in terms of efficiency entering the WKU contest.

Against the Hilltoppers, the Owls kicked the aforementioned 14-yard punt. They delivered a low snap on another punt attempt that resulted in a hurried, 32-yard punt. The first punt of the third quarter netted just 25 yards.

Rice also had a punt returned muffed, but were fortunate to recover that one with the return man quickly falling on the loose ball.

Add in four fumbles (one lost), four interceptions and eight penalties for 80 yards and you get a recipe for losing football games. Even when your defense is able to force four turnovers to help lighten the load.

Imperfect offensive evolution

Although it might have been missed in the series of close games Rice has played in recent weeks and the blowout at the hands of Western Kentucky, the Rice offense has taken a meaningful step forward. Against Charlotte, Rice recorded the highest yardage total (468 yards) they’d managed against an FBS opponent under Bloomgren. The play was sloppy against WKU, but the Owls did move the ball.

During this recent stretch, Rice had mixed running and passing and has proven effective on both fronts. Ari Broussard has been a revelation on the ground, but for every long, bruising run he delivers, the offense has also spread out in a five-wide formation and trusted quarterback Jake Constantine to find the open man.

It’s entirely possible Rice has run more plays with empty backfields in the past three weeks than they ran in the previous three seasons combined.

With no Bradley Rozner or Jordan Myers (a late scratch) on the field, Rice got down the field. Costly turnovers and errant throws from Constantine were the limiting factors for Rice against WKU, but the scheme itself was productive.

Broussard ran for 60 yards on 15 carries. Constantine passed for 380 yards and one touchdown. This offense has an identity — they finished with 504 total yards against Western Kentucky — but they’re not playing clean. And they’re running out of time.

Officially missed the mark

Reaching the postseason was the unquestioned expectation for Rice football this year. They will not get there. The Owls’ seventh loss of the season on Saturday ensured they will be staying home for the holidays once more. On that front, this season is a disappointment.

Bloomgren will undoubtedly have to answer for the shortcomings, and he has largely owned the missteps to this point. His team did not reach the expectations they set out to achieve and he, the coaching staff, and these players were noticeably frustrated by the overtime losses and missed opportunities along the way, as they should be.

Now what? Rice football has two games remaining on its 2021 slate: at UTEP and home vs Louisiana Tech. Should the Owls win both games, they’d finish with a 5-7 record and a .417 winning percentage, still the highest any Rice team has reached since 2014. Even winning one of the final pair would represent the most victories in a single season since the 2015 squad went 5-7. To that end, there is something to play for.

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Rice Basketball: Owls shut down by stifling Houston defense

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After an impressive opening win, Rice basketball fell back to earth as Hoston cooled the Owls’ offense and handed Rice its first loss of the season.

If there was any remaining early-season rust, the Houston Cougars didn’t show it in their meeting with Rice basketball on Friday night at the Fertitta Center. The Coogs’ defense was suffocating early, holding a typically explosive Rice offense to just five points through the first 12 minutes of play. Rice was without Chris Mullins and Quincy Olivari was limited. But no matter who was on the court, the shots just weren’t falling.

Carl Pierre opened the scoring with a dunk. 2-0 Rice. From that point onward, Rice would make one of its next 14 shots. It wasn’t just an off night for the Owls’ offense, they couldn’t find open looks anywhere. In the seconds leading up to a triple from Jake Lieppert with 6:58 to play before halftime, the Houston lead had ballooned to 17 points.

“The knockout was early,” Pera said, point-blank.

Worn down from too many fruitless trips up the court, the Rice defense which held tough early, started to slip. By the time the halftime buzzer blared across the sea of red-clad fans, Rice trailed 44-15. That was all she wrote.

“They pretty much did they wanted all night,” Pera said. “We didn’t have much resistance and we didn’t have much attack on offense to get what we wanted.”

Entering this contest, the lowest scoring output for a Pera-coached Rice basketball team was 41 points in a losing effort against FAU on Feb. 16, 2019. Just how anomalous is that? Rice has failed to reach 50 points just three times under Pera, once each in the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons. Conversely, the Owls had topped 90 points 10 times over that stretch.

More: Rice Basketball Season Preview

Every team has its off nights, but this rough outing was magnified by a superb outing against one of the nation’s top teams. If the Pepperdine win was a solid launching point, this was the crash landing not long after. The reality of how good this team can and will be is most likely somewhere in between.

Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson offered a similar sentiment as he closed out his own postgame remarks. “That team could make the tournament,” he said of the Hofstra team that took Houston to overtime three nights prior, “I don’t know if they will or not, but they’re good.” Then came the twist. “Rice is probably a little better than Hofstra, but we were better tonight.”

Where does Rice fit in the mix between Houston and Hofstra? That’s what we’re going to find out over the course of the next several weeks and months. On Friday, the reality was this: whether expected or not, Rice wasn’t very close to a team coming off a trip to the Final Four.

Player Spotlight | Max Fielder

The box score might not fully reflect it, but Max Fiedler acquitted himself well for much of the game against Houston. He disrupted shooting lanes on the defensive side of the court, forcing Houston into difficult angles or bypassing the lane altogether in favor of an outside shot. On a night where Rice wasn’t securing anything that bounced off either rim, Fiedler was strong off the glass. In 22 minutes, he finished second among all players with seven rebounds.

Final Box | Houston 79 – Rice 46

Up Next | Full Schedule

Rice basketball returns home on Tuesday, November 16 to host Southern. That will be the Owls’ last home game for two weeks. They visit New Orleans on Friday, November 19 before heading to Florida to play in the Gulf Coast Showcase the following week.

Photo credit Maria Lysaker
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Rice Basketball: Stout defense propels Owls past Pepperdine

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A stout defensive performance propelled Rice basketball over Pepperdine in decisive fashion to lift the Owls’ to 1-0 on their young season.

There wasn’t much about the early goings of the Rice basketball season opener against Pepperdine that seemed unusual. The Owls hit the first shot of the game, a triple from Carl Pierre, then knocked down two more threes in what appeared to be the beginnings of a back-and-forth game the likes of which had been played at Tudor Fieldhouse time and time again

In those games, Rice would shoot the lights out and try as hard as they could to muster enough stops on defense to hang on. Things seemed to be trending towards those same ‘ol Owls on Tuesday night, right up until the halftime buzzer. Then something shifted.

More: Rice Basketball Season Preview

With Chris Mullins — who head coach Scott Pera point-blank referred to as the team’s best defensive player — sidelined with a finger injury suffered early in the game, the Rice defense clamped down. The Owls allowed seven points in the first 10 minutes of the second half, rattling off a 28-7 run which turned a close game into a rout. They didn’t ease up much at all the rest of the way, limiting Pepperdine to a pedestrian 35.4 percent shooting from the field.

“We defended. We defended for 40 minutes and that was the difference,” Pera said emphatically after the game.

That refrain matches the chorus sung by Pera and his players last week during preseason media availability. Back at that time this team made it crystal clear they’d’ been exerting the majority of their efforts on getting better on that side of the court. Against Pepperdine, that attention to detail showed.

Again, Pera echoed “[Defense is] certainly the emphasis. Things become important when it’s on the front of your mind, and it’s on the front of our guys’ minds, it’s been since June.” And now, Rice has taken those ideas and made them a reality.

Rice shot 35.5 percent from three against Pepperdine. Preseason All-Conference honoree Quincy Olivari did not make any of his three attempts, battling through a wrist injury. It was a fine night from distance, but not one that this “Green Light U” squad is going to write home about. This is a team that can and has shot 40 percent, even 45 or 50 percent from three.

But even on a mediocre shooting night from three, this iteration of Rice basketball won by 19 points. When asked what this team might be capable of on a good shooting night from distance, Pera couldn’t suppress a grin, before letting out this subtle promise: “When we’re healthy and we’re really cooking, we will put on a show some nights.”

Player Spotlight | Noah Hutchins

Travis Evee led all Rice scorers with 24 points and six made three-pointers, but it was a surprise 13 minutes from Noah Hutchins that proved to be particularly intriguing. Hutchins only returned to practice this past week after recovering from an injury of his own, but he was thrust into meaningful minutes when Mullins went down.

Hutchins ended with a +4 plus/minus, largely because he happened to not be on the court during much of the Owls’ decisive second-half run, but he did settle things down when he entered, helping lead the charge on some key sequences. With Mullins’ status for the Houston game unknown, Rice could lead on Hutchins more in the near future. He acquitted himself well in his debut.

Final Box | Rice 82 – Pepperdine 63

Up Next | Full Schedule

Rice basketball will hit the road for a short trip across town on Friday when they’ll visit the University of Houston to take on the Top 15 Cougars at the Fertitta Center, where they narrowly escaped an upset at the hands of Hofstra on Tuesday. Tip-off for that game is scheduled for 7:00 p.m. It will be available for streaming on ESPN+. After that, Rice returns home on Tuesday, November 16 to host Southern.

Photo credit Maria Lysaker
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Rice Football runs out of gas in overtime loss to Charlotte

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Rice Football had a two-score lead in the second half, but couldn’t hang on, dropping another overtime heartbreaker against a conference foe.

The road has been kind to Rice football in recent years. Some of the Owls’ biggest wins — their upset of Marshall last season and their victory over UAB earlier this year — have come away from Rice Stadium. That road rally did not hold true on Saturday. After falling behind in the first half, the Owls took control in the second stanza before watching Charlotte punch back to force overtime and eventually win.

Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:

Owls overcome a shaky start

The opening sequence went almost as well as could have been expected for Rice football against Charlotte. The Owls’ defense forced a punt, giving the offense possession just beyond the midfield stripe. A couple of crisp passes from Jake Constantine and powerful runs from Ari Broussard and Jordan Myers pushed them inside the Charlotte 20 yard line.

Rice had already converted on fourth-and-one in the drive, extending their fourth-down conversion streak to 10 in a row. But on fourth-and-one from the 17-yard line, Rice trotted out the field goal unit and missed, again. The miss was the third consecutive kick that did not go through the uprights for the Rice special teams unit, with blame attributable to everyone from the snapper, to the holder to the kicker himself.

The Roost Podcast: Stay tuned for the game recap this week 

Second-guessing decisions that didn’t work out is the purest form of armchair quarterback that exists. And while it’s easy to say Rice should have done something else, it’s the decision-making process that’s puzzling.

If Rice had already shown themselves to be extremely adept at converting on fourth-and-short on that drive and they knew their special teams unit was struggling, was the 10-yard difference between the spot of that kick and the spot of their previous fourth-down conversion? Charlotte took over, drove the length of the field and took the lead.

If the short-yardage offense works and the kicking game doesn’t, perhaps that should impact how the Owls attack their opponents going forward. It noticeably did from that point onward.

What is the plan on special teams?

After that miss, Rice seemed more cognizant of their fourth-down decisions moving forward. The Owls would trust their offense rather than their kicking game on the next three similar decisions.

On fourth-and-six from the Charlotte 32, Jake Constantine found Jake Bailey for a 10-yard gain and a first down rather than lining up to try a 49-yard field goal.

The next drive, on fourth-and-three from the Charlotte 26, Constantine couldn’t hit Cedric Patterson on a fourth-down pass and Rice turned it over on doubts. The alternative would have been a 43-yard field goal.

Then, with 22-seconds before the halftime whistle, Constantine dropped a ball into the waiting arms of August Pitre who couldn’t hang on in the endzone as he hit the turf. Rice turned it over on downs rather than settle for a 47-yard field goal from the Charlotte 30.

It wouldn’t be fair to question the lack of fourth down aggression at the beginning of the game and then bemoan unsuccessful attempts from that point onward. Constantine’s pass to Pitre should have been held on to for what would have been the game-tying score. The process was fine. But that does beg one more question. How close does Rice need to be to trust their kicker?

Can Rice convert a 40-yard field goal if they have to? Right now, it’s hard to know for sure.

Rice has its running back

Ari Broussard has gotten more and more involved as the season has progressed, and for good reason. Broussard entered the game leading all Rice running backs with a healthy 4.3 yards per carry. He set a career-high on the ground two weeks ago when he rumbled for 65 yards on 16 carries. He almost outdid that mark on one drive against Charlotte, gaining 57 yards on one second-quarter drive.

Good blocking helps. Exhibit A: Broussard’s first career touchdown run.

But even though the line did seem to have a better day than they did last week against North Texas, Broussard kept finding a way to get the extra yard and fall forward. After carrying the Owls the bulk of the way, Rice turned to him with the game on the line in the fourth quarter. He delivered a 17-yard run. When he left the field, Rice was quickly forced to punt.

Broussard had 97 yards before halftime. He finished with 186 yards on 20 carries and two touchdown runs. Handing him the ball 30 times a game probably isn’t a viable long term solution, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else out-carrying him down the stretch. He’s been that good.

Running out of time

The transitive property does not apply to college football. Yet after seeing Charlotte get dusted in each of their two previous games, there was nothing leading into their game with Rice that made this challenge seem insurmountable. And coming on the heels of an overtime loss to North Texas, Rice needed this.

Sitting at 3-5 with four games to play, a bowl game berth was in reach. And although this wasn’t mathematically a make-or-break contest to get Rice to six wins, it sure felt like one.

Consistency has been the elephant in the room for Rice football this season. Resiliency has been their calling card. With their backs against the wall in need of a bounce-back once again, this team responded, but they couldn’t hang on. Now they have to win their final three games (vs WKU, at UTEP, vs Louisiana Tech) to reach the postseason. That’s a tall task, and now they’ve lost their margin of error.

Special teams needs a lot of work. The defense bent and eventually broke. The offense has to improve in the redzone, but has the horses (Constantine, Bailey, Broussard) to get the ball down the field with regularity. There’s a lot to do and Rice football is running out of time.

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Is the front seven heating up?

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Rice Basketball: Owls get past St. Edwards in opening exhibition

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Rice basketball started fast and led wire-to-wire in their victory over St. Edwards in the Owls’ lone exhibition contest before the 2021-2022 season.

Unlike the beginning of the prior season in which Rice basketball experienced a turnover of nearly its entire starting lineup and several other key members of the roster, the Owls enter the 2021-2022 season with largely the same faces on the hardwood of Tudor Fieldhouse. On Thursday night in front of their first home crowd since 2019, the team showcased their renewed depth and two new additions who are expected to become mainstays in the core rotation: Terrance McBride and Carl Pierre.

The Roost Podcast: Debriefing Rice football vs North Texas and C-USA news

Pierre drew the start and scored 10 points with five rebounds in 26 minutes of action. McBride came off the bench and added four points of his own in 17 minutes. Both were part of a constant stream of faces of the Owls’ bench.

The number of players head coach Scott Pera opts to utilize going forward will likely be a much smaller circle, but for Thursday’s exhibition, getting a good feel for all of his guys in live-action was the goal. “I was more concerned with minutes than I was with anything else,” Pera said.

“It’s a long season, a lot of games” Pierre echoed, “There’s a lot of wear and tear that comes with it. To be able to go deep into our bench and have good depth is going to be huge.”

Rice opened things up with a quick basket from Max Fiedler, who grabbed a feed inside from Pierre and laid it up for an easy two points. In the first five minutes, Rice would stretch that two-point lead to a 12-4 advantage, extending their edge to 21 points in the first half behind a balanced distribution of touches and scoring.

St. Edwards would chip away in the second half, cutting the sizable difference down to as few as six points during the early stages. Rice responded by going to the glass, pushing their lead back to 14 with a pair of dunks, three layups and a Quincy Olivari free throw. Rice would later close on a 10-0 run to secure the exhibition win.

Stat Corner | 49.2 percent

Given the free-flowing style of offense Rice basketball likes to play, the Owls’ aren’t going to concern themselves too much with field goal percentage on any given night. Rice averaged a 44.0 percent clip from the field last season, finishing at 50 percent or better in six of their 28 games.

Rice converted on 49.2 percent of their shots against St. Edwards, a game in which they played far more players than they will in the regular season. Combing high-value shots with high-value efficiency will be crucial if this team wants to hit its ceiling. This was a very positive start.

“I think we really stalled (in the second half) we didn’t shoot it great tonight,” Pera remarked afterwards. “I think if you check back, the nights we shot under under 30 percent from three. I don’t think we ever shot close to 50 (percent) from the floor and that’s been the difference in this team the whole preseason. The days in practice we haven’t shot well from three we’ve still shot close to 50 percent from the floor, because we’ve been better around the basket finishing and that’s going to be really, really important.”

Up Next | Full Schedule

Rice basketball officially opens its season next week at Tudor Fieldhouse with a game against Pepperdine on Tuesday, Nov. 9. That will be their only remaining tuneup before a trip across town to take on Houston, which opens the season ranked No. 15 in the AP Poll. Rice and Houston did not meet last season.

Photo credit Maria Lysaker
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