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CUSA Media Day Roundup: All eyes on the Rice football offense

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After a busy offseason, change was the pivotal word for Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren when speaking about his offense in 2021.

The Rice football defense was one of the most dominant units in Conference USA last year. The Owls climbed all the way up to No. 12 in the nation in scoring defense and blanked a Top 15 team on the road. If any facet of this team deserved to be the focal point of conversation when the 2021 season rolled around, the defense had done everything they conceivably could to put themselves in the spotlight.

But beginning with the first question Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren was asked during Conference USA Media Days and proceeding to the last, the focus was clear: offense, offense, offense.

To some extent, the defense is a known commodity at this point. They’re going to be good, really good. But minus one notable departure, former linebacker Blaze Alldredge, that unit will look the same. The offense is going to look different.

Read more in the 2021 Rice Football Season Preview, available for purchase now. 150+ pages on Rice football, their 2021 opponents and more.

“I’m not normally very comfortable with change,” Bloomgren admitted in his opening remarks, “but I’m excited about these changes,” he said, referring primarily to the hiring of new offensive coordinator Marques Tuiasosopo. The addition of transfer quarterback Luke McCaffrey fits in that “change” category as well.

Bloomgren didn’t get too far into x’s and o’s, beyond specifying from a play design and scheme standpoint “a lot of it’s the same”, with only so many different combinations of blocks and routes. But how that offense is executed, and who’s executing on those instructions is what’s meant to be differential.

That’s where Luke McCaffrey comes in. Although he wasn’t guaranteed anything beyond a locker and helmet when he arrived, early returns are already positive. Bloomgren was effusive when praising his character and how he carried himself. The on the field production, that matters too.

“That’s a very talented individual that’s been successful on a big stage coming to our program,” Bloomgren said knowingly before getting into how the offense can utilize the run game to take shots downfield. They’ll also have the benefit of returning all five starting offensive linemen, what Bloomgren estimates is probably a first for him in his coaching career.

Add in 10 returning offensive starters overall and you get a delicate mix of familiarity and change. How the coaching staff sorts through the chaos and puts the pieces together will mean all the difference.

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Putting an imperfect 2020 Rice football season into perspective

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The 2020 Rice Football season has come to an end. Putting the up-and-down campaign into perspective will be an ongoing task.

With 49 seconds to play in the fourth quarter, Rice football trailed UAB 21-16. Third-string quarterback Wiley Green lined up alongside third-string running back Ari Broussard, dropped back and threw to Jake Bailey. First down. Three plays later Green found Bailey again. First down. Then, on fourth-and-18, Green uncorked a Hail Mary pass which was intercepted on the 2-yard line. Game over.

“I guess I need to be more prayerful,” head coach Mike Bloomgren said after the game. He was speaking more broadly about the unfortunate injury luck his team had suffered at key positions this season, but his whistful “what if” hung in the air. Just like that last-second pass from the arm of Green.

Green, the backup to the backup quarterback, targeting a tight end in the endzone from 50 yards out was, in many ways, a fitting final play of the Owls’ bizarre 2020 season. Rice almost had to throw it to a tight end because they had run out of wide receivers.

Bradley Rozner had been injured and opted out before the season. Transfer Christian McStravick never played a down for the Owls. Neither did Zane Knipe. August Pitre caught one pass in the season opener before suffering an injury. Austin Trammell, who set multiple school records when he exploded for five touchdowns and 219 yards in the Owls’ first two games, didn’t suit up in this game either.

Rice was down to Jake Bailey, who had missed practice time during the week with an injury, and freshman Andrew Mason. Converted running back Kobie Campbell, who hadn’t touched the ball this season, was targeted twice.

“We had multiple weeks where we had a practice with one scholarship wide receiver healthy,” Bloomgren admitted, “We just love this game, and we said ‘we’re going to play’.”

Takeaways: Rice Football falls to UAB

At quarterback, Mike Collins was missing his second straight game. Backup JoVoni Johnson had been injured a few drives earlier. And that doesn’t take into account the secondary which had made do all season with players coming in and out of the lineup or the continued absence of lead running back Juma Otaviano.

Bloomgren isn’t one to make excuses, and he acknowledged Rice wasn’t the only team who had to deal with adversity this year. Their opponent on Saturday had more than a dozen key players missing (but they did have their quarterback, something that proved fateful for the Owls). Still, the Owls’ headman did say this: “We’re all better with our ones.”

Instead, that last-second heave fell into the hands of a defensive back and a year of highs and lows came to an unpleasant end. Rice was in the running for a bowl bid with a win. The loss ended the Owls’ season sooner than anyone hoped it would finish.

“We know nothing’s perfect in 2020,” Bloomgren affirmed.

Before he stepped off the stand and began the first steps of the Owls’ sudden offseason, he posed one more “what if”.

“We lost today by one score… we had a double-overtime game. We got to find a way to win those things, and that’s the difference. Think about how different we feel about our season right now, and how jubilant everybody would be if we’d won one or two of those games.”

Rice didn’t win those games. Their final 2020 record will forever be inked at 2-3. But Bloomgren’s hypothetical isn’t too farfetched. It might even have more merit than initially meets the eye. Rice beat the C-USA East champ and was one third-string-quarterback Hail Mary from beating the top team in the West.

A few more favorable bounces wouldn’t have helped the teams Rice defeated. Those victories both came by three scores. But one more bounce, or a prayer, in those losses might very well have been enough. It wasn’t perfect, but in 2020, nothing was.

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Rice Football: Mike Bloomgren all smiles after banner day

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On Saturday Rice football knocked off previously unbeaten Marshall in what could become a defining moment for head coach Mike Bloomgren and the Owls.

Not long after the team had finished celebrating on the field, Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren tucked away into a side room for the now conventional zoom postgame session with the media. Even with his face cloaked by a mask, it was easy to see his cheekbones raise in a triumphant smile.

“I can’t remember the last time I’ve been more proud of a team,” he said, his first words following the Owls’ first win over a ranked team on the road in almost 30 years.

His face glowed when he mentioned impressive showings by individual performers. There was JoVoni Johnson’s poise under adversity, Naeem Smith’s pick-six in his first game back from injury, former walk-on Ari Broussard’s game-sealing fourth quarter runs. And so much more.

That moment brought back memories of another cramped road game press conference. One in a much different context in San Antonio, Tx last November. Following a loss to UTSA that left his team 0-7, Bloomgren’s ever even-keeled speech was crystal clear.

“We’ve made progress,” he said on that painful night. “We want to make the progress that matters. We want to get one in the left column. And we’re going to keep working towards that.”

14 months later, not only has Bloomgren “got one in the left column”, he’s built something resembling the program he’s been seeking since he arrived at South Main.

More: Rice football stuns undefeated Marshall

Including the Owls’ blown lead and subsequent seventh consecutive loss against UTSA last fall, Rice football has gotten off to a shaky 2-18 start. Two more losses in the two games that followed sent the Owls’ record to 2-20. But when the switch flipped. On the road against Middle Tennessee, things started to change.

After winning 10 percent of his first 22 games, Bloomgren and Co. have won five of their last seven, and that includes a loss that saw a rogue football bounces off four uprights. Even with the bad bounces, that’s a 71.4 percent clip that includes the Owls’ landmark win over Marshall.

Which brings us back to Saturday.

“We were exactly who we wanted to be,” Bloomgren said. “It was intellectual brutality all over the field.”

Intellectual Brutality. The exertion of one’s mind and willpower over the man in front of you. The drum beat of this program from the moment Bloomgren first arrived on campus. At long last, coming into focus. It wasn’t perfect. There’s still a lot of work to be done. But today, even if for just a few hours, “who we should be”, as linebacker Blaze Alldredge described it, was on full display.

“Belief and trust have been our mantra for a few weeks now, even though we haven’t got the play,” he acknowledged with a grin. Even if it were only himself and his players that kept that faith, the results speak volumes. And more importantly, it gives this team a foundation to build on for the future. A future beyond pandemics causing last-minute cancelations and of seasons with fewer injuries and fewer bad bounces.

Rice football took a big step on Saturday. A step that was a long time coming.

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Fumbled Away: Rice football only has itself to blame for North Texas loss

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The first game back from consecutive postponements didn’t go well for Rice football, who made too many mistakes to earn a conference win on the road.

Rice football entered their game against North Texas with a specific plan on defense. They weren’t going to let Jaelon Darden beat them through the air and they weren’t going to let Jason Bean beat them on the ground. Both of those players scored touchdowns, but each was held relatively in check save for one big play apiece.

Had Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren been offered that—a sub .500 completion percentage day from Bean and one touchdown reception for the nation’s leading receiver—he would have taken it in a heartbeat.

To some extent, Rice football got what they hoped for on that side of the ball. 27 points surrendered to the conference’s top scoring offense makes for a relatively successful day, no matter how the points were accumulated.

The offensive side of the ball was a completely different story.

Recap: Owls fall flat in loss to North Texas

When asked to sum it up, Bloomgren seemed a bit perplexed. “It felt like game one all over again,” he said. “For 10 minutes, we played our kind of football and did the things that we need to do. And then I have no idea what switched.”

That confusion extended beyond Bloomgren’s perception. The Rice offense, which had scored 30+ points in four of their last five games dating back to last season, couldn’t maintain that trajectory.

Rice marched down the field on its’ first two possessions, scoring 10 points. They didn’t add any more until the final 10 seconds of regulation when it was far too late.

North Texas had seven sacks, the most-ever under coach Seth Littrell. Rice fumbled four times, turning the ball over twice. The special teams committed their third turnover on a punt in three games. Any adjustments that were made failed to overcome the missteps.

Rice football had three weeks to iron out their own mistakes on offense and came up short.

Defensive captain Blaze Alldredge couldn’t have been more clear. His words speak to the faults of the entire team, even if he was referring specifically to his side of the ball. “At the end of the day, it’s  not about what they did,” he said, “It’s about what we didn’t do.”

Rice football didn’t play well enough to win against North Texas. They did against Southern Miss and they didn’t against Middle Tennessee. Sometimes it is that easy. Rice has the talent to beat any team in Conference USA, but do they have the consistency and the discipline? That’s something Bloomgren and Co. have to fix. This team has too much potential to fumble away.

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Rice Football: Bad bounces, poor results and rough goings

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Rice Football dropped its 2020 season opener to Middle Tennessee, proving once again that both bad luck and bad process can end in heartbreak.

Just once last season did Rice football allow a Conference USA opponent to score 34 points. UAB scored 35 in a soggy, rain-delayed contest at Legion Field. Rice reached that threshold themselves for the first time under Mike Bloomgren on Saturday night against Middle Tennessee. Entering the MTSU game, Rice was 3-0 under head coach Mike Bloomgren when scoring 30 points.

Given those two pieces of information, a big night from the Rice offense and a historically stingy Rice defense, one would have thought the odds would have favored the Owls. Nope.

“I think the statement the ball didn’t bounce our way is probably true,” Bloomgren said in his postgame comments. He’s right about that.

He’s also right about there being plenty of things Rice could have done differently to win the game.

As Bloomgren often says, football is a zero-sum game. You either win or you lose. On Saturday, Rice lost.

“Does it hurt more? Losing sucks. It hurts. It hurts bad.”

After they recover from oggling over the quadruple doinked field goal, the masses will debate the list of failures that went into the Owls’ 10th loss in their last 14 games. Context, something oft spared in the moment, does paint a more uncertain picture.

Rice went into the Middle Tennesse game without Naeem Smith, George Nyakwol, Tyrae Thornton, Andrew Bird or Jason White. With the exceptions of Tre’shon Devones and Treshawn Chamberlain, Rice fielded a secondary that did not see meaningful action at all last season. Three members — Sean Fresch, Miles McCord and Kirk Lockhart, were making their first career starts.

Middle Tennesse and Asher O’Hara thew all over that secondary.

Bloomgren is well aware of that problem, and vowed to work with defensive coordinator Brian Smith to make the necessary changes so that Rice can, in his words, “find a way to not have press conferences like this.”

The Rice defense has struggled through the air before. The 2018 unit fell victim to the home run ball again and again. Then last year, Nyakwol stepped up his game. Smith burst onto the scene. Devones emerged as a true cover corner. They found players to fix that problem. Passes seldom went over their heads last fall. Most of those solutions did not play on Saturday.

Tack on a poorly overthrown interception by Collins, a strip-sack returned for a touchdown and a muffed punt and you get a back-breaking loss from a program that entered the game with the second-longest active winning streak by an FBS team in Texas.

The three turnovers are roughly 2.5 times as many as the Owls averaged last year (1.3).

Team captain Blaze Alldredge took the burden on himself. ” I was raised on tough love so I just got to call it what it is,” he said, “the defense didn’t play well enough.”

Fellow captain Austin Trammell echoed it. “We gotta fix our mistakes.”

The conservative play calling in overtime is always going to draw criticism in losses. Deservedly so. But in many ways that bad bounce summed up a lot of things that went wrong on Saturday night, and ironically enough, fell on the foot of a player who had performed well on all of his attempts to that point.

Rice football did a lot right. They did a lot wrong. Sometimes things can just be weird. Just like 2020. How likely would it be for a team to lose their entire starting secondary, trail at halftime, make adjustments, throw for four touchdowns (the most by a Rice quarterback since 2016), convert a fourth-and-24 to force overtime and find yet another way to lose in heartbreaking fashion.

About as likely as a doink. doink. doink. doink.

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