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Update: Rice Football head coach Mike Bloomgren expected to return in 2022

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I wanted to give yall a quick update with the news breaking on Sunday. Chris Vannini of The Athletic was first to report Rice head coach Mike Bloomgren would be back in 2022. This lines up with conversations I’ve had in recent weeks. Every indication up to this point has been that Bloomgren would return in 2022. This is not a surprise.

Obviously, this has significant ramifications on the outlook for Rice football in 2022 and beyond. Here’s a quick reaction video posted for our subscribers on Patreon. We’ll also have further discussion on The Roost Podcast this week as well as a more detailed review of some of the key decision points and factors soon.

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Rice Football 2024: Bye Week 2 Practice Report

Posted: November 20, 2024

Rice football has two games left in the regular season and UAB is next on the docket. Here’s what we learned from the Owls at practice this week. After a lighter week of work on the practice field last week, Rice football returned to work in earnest this week following the bye. A relatively healthy […]

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Rice Football 2024: UAB presser quotes and depth chart

Posted: November 19, 2024

Next up for Rice football: UAB. Here’s what interim head coach Pete Alamar had to say about the matchup and a few depth chart notes. Interim head coach Pete Alamar and a set of players met with the media for their customary weekly availability. They recapped the bye week and then looked ahead at their […]

Rice Football, NFL Owls

Rice Football 2024: NFL Owls Week 11 Roundup

Posted: November 18, 2024

Rice Football is well represented on 2024 NFL rosters. Here’s the latest from the NFL Owls in action in Week 11. There are former Rice football players scattered across the NFL. Stay tuned each week for their game results and notables from each player. Team NFL Owl(s) This Week Result Next Week Detroit Lions Jack […]

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Rice Football 2024 Game Preview: UAB

Posted: November 17, 2024

Rice football is back from the bye week and hopes to finish the season strong with a win over UAB. How to watch, key stats, x-factor picks and more. Both Rice football and their upcoming opponent, the UAB Blazers, most recently squared off with UAB and met similar results. Rice fell 27-20 in a Friday […]

The Roost Podcast, Rice Football, Rice Football Recruiting, Conference USA, Rice Basketball

The Roost Podcast | Ep 192 – Where does Rice Football fit with Shehan Jeyarajah

Posted: November 14, 2024

Rather than dwell on the Memphis game we welcome Shehan Jeyarajah of CBS Sports to discuss where Rice football fits in the college football world right now. As Rice football embarks on a head coaching search — the latest on that front is right here — it felt appropriate to step back from the game […]

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“Tangible Progress” and the future for Rice Football, Mike Bloomgren

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A thrilling comeback has Rice football and head coach Mike Bloomgren feeling good, but what’s next for Bloomgren and for the Owls?

Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren coached his first game at South Main on August 25, 2018. On that day, his team trailed Prairie View A&M 28-19 entering the fourth quarter before winning on a walk-off field goal by Jack Fox.

The Owls would face many fourth-quarter deficits from that point onward. Up until Saturday, they hadn’t overcome a margin of as much as a single point since that opening game. In fact, Rice entered their final game of the 2021 season 1-31 when trailing at any point in the fourth quarter.

So when Rice quarterback TJ McMahon, who opened the season as the fourth-stringer on the depth chart, tossed an interception with the home team already trailing by 10 points with just under 10 minutes to play, things looked bleak.

Then the Rice defense forced a punt and McMahon and Co. unleashed a stunning five-play, 92-yard touchdown drive. The defense picked Louisiana Tech off once again, forced another three-and-out and a long punt return from Sean Fresch set McMahon up for his second fourth-quarter touchdown pass and a remarkable come-from-behind victory.

The victory was the Owl’s fourth of the season and, as Bloomgren was apt to mention postgame, the most wins Rice football has had since 2015. What does that mean for this program moving forward?

“It’s happening. It’s not happening at the pace that we want it to. It’s not happening at the pace I want it to, but it’s happening,” Bloomgren said with an assured, yet measured enthusiasm.

Bloomgren then steered the conversation back to the senior class. “It was so important for them to leave the program better than they found it and I think they can tangibly say they did,” he contended. “Their freshman year they had one win. Their next year they had two and now we’re building. Again not at the pace any of us want, but we’re building and I think their impact is going to be felt and remembered in this program for a while to come.”

More: Rice Football rallies to knock off LA Tech

Four wins are, indeed, tangible progress. Add in two overtime contests and somehow account for the loss of several defensive starters who missed the bulk of the season and Rice football could be as close to that next step as many between the hedges believe themselves to be.

Rice doesn’t play Texas or Arkansas next season, but they do play USC. The rest of the non-conference slate includes Houston, McNeese State and a Louisiana team that might have a new head coach in the coming weeks. Other C-USA programs on their schedule like UTSA and WKU both project to have massive amounts of turnover given how many seniors fill their rosters. There is opportunity.

Even if his moment in the spotlight is brief, McMahon seemed fully in touch with its significance. “I think it just shows that we can hang with anybody we play with,” he said, before going on to address a looming question the Rice fanbase desperately wants to know, adding, “I think in the next year we’ll be where we want to be, at the least.”

That promised land includes a bowl trip. It speaks of a season that in which, in Bloomgren’s own words could see this program get to “six, seven, eight, nine, 10 wins, whatever that looks like next year,” provided they find a way to turn those near misses into wins, no matter what it takes.

The ascent has been slow, but it’s there. Bloomgren has championed process since he arrived at Rice. The next step is to take a hard look in the mirror and to modify the process to squeeze out every win this program is truly capable of achieving. Even if that means some uncomfortable conversations.

“Somehow, we gotta find a way to do it,” Bloomgren said. Indeed they do. It started with winning one more on Saturday, reminding all this program is certainly capable of rediscovering winning ways. Where next? Only time will tell.

Photo credit Maria Lysaker
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Erratic Rice Football season hits yet another speedbump

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Inconsistency and injuries have derailed what once promised to be an exciting season, leaving Rice football instead with a trail of hard days.

If the Surgeon General were given the task of affixing an appropriate cautionary label on the 2021 Rice football season, it might go something like this:

Warning! Ups and downs may induce whiplash.

The toll exerted by this season and by this most recent game has fans, players and coaches reeling in dismay. Seemingly every high has been met with an equally aggressive low.

When Jake Constantine hit Cedric Patterson for a 33-yard touchdown in the final seconds of the first half it gave Rice their first three-touchdown quarter since 2016. The team had halftime and the early moments of the third quarter to savor that history before allowing 24 unanswered points to UTEP and watching the game, much like several this season, slip away.

“Defensively, we couldn’t stop them,” head coach Mike Bloomgren admitted following the defeat.

Somehow the Rice defense which had held UTEP to 14 points in the first half nearly allowed double that output after the break, largely on the back of big plays and defensive breakdowns. In the second half alone, UTEP completed passes of 23, 30, and 65 yards. Despite rushing for just two total yards before halftime, the Miners churned out runs of 12, 13, 14 and 74 yards.

Staked to a halftime lead, Rice couldn’t hold on. Safety Naeem Smith, clearly disappointed with the results, said it was “just the little things for us today, whether it was lining up, tackling and different things like that.”

Those little things aren’t meant to be debilitating to this degree so late in the season. Then again, playing with an ever-depleting roster isn’t helping. But that’s the hand Rice has been dealt. A hand continues to get more challenging with every passing week.

Rice lost its leading wide receiver, Jake Bailey, midway through the third quarter. They lost their quarterback, Jake Constantine, a few drives later. Constantine’s early exit marks the fifth time Rice has lost a quarterback to injury in a game this season. They’ve only played 11 games.

“We look like a MASH unit right now,” Bloomgren grimaced before adding, “But a lot of people in college football do and we still gotta be able to get our job done.”

More: Rice football rally falls short against UTEP

For better or worse, Rice football has been here before. They’re familiar with the heartbreak and the physical and emotional toll this year has taken on this team. They’ve been dealt a tough hand and, at times, have made things tougher on themselves. But the season isn’t over quite yet.

“At the end of the day, it’s football,” Smith said.”We’re going to lose guys, sadly, [we] just gotta keep working.”

They’ll have one more week of practices to do so before their final game at home against Louisiana Tech. Buckle up. If recent history is any indication, it’s going to be a bumpy ride, regardless of the result.

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Rice Football: Owls in search of growth as regular season wanes

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Rice football hasn’t reached the goals it set for itself this season. What’s next for the Owls and what’s at stake moving forward?

“Not the way we wanted this game to go.” An understatement that felt like it carried more weight than the words alone could possibly have expressed when they were uttered by Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren following the team’s third consecutive conference loss on Saturday at the hands of Western Kentucky. The loss dropped the Owls’ record to 3-7, realistically eliminating them from postseason contention.

It was after that loss that Bloomgren was officially forced to come to terms with his team was in relation to the expectations they set for themselves entering the season.

Senior leaders Shea Baker and Elijah Garcia delivered their brutally honest feelings, too. Baker called the loss “disappointing”. Garcia struck a heartstring with his assessment. “It hurts, man. It hurts. [Making a bowl game] is why I chose to come back.”

The atmosphere was, understandably, grim.

Although downtrodden, there were no signs of throwing in the towel just yet. Bloomgren said the message to his team remainder focusing on what’s next, on “how we’re going to go forward right now and stick together.”

Rice still has two games remaining on their schedule. The Owls travel to El Paso next week to play a UTEP team currently on a three-game losing streak. They then end the season against a Louisiana Tech team that has dropped five of their last six. On paper, neither opponent seems as daunting as the juggernaut that is Western Kentucky and quarterback Bailey Zappe.

Rapid Reaction: Rice football falls to Western Kentucky

One more win would give Rice the most victories in a season under Bloomgren to date (four). Two wins would give Rice an increased winning percentage in every season since he took over the program prior to the 2018 season. Both outcomes are still on the table and Rice has proven — with their wins over UAB this year and Marshall last year — that they can beat just about any conference foe on any given Saturday.

That’s not the question though. The question isn’t can they win. The question is have they and will they continue to show the growth that’s been expected of them. Can they become a program that consistently wins? And further still, have they shown enough progress to reaching those ends, and will they finish down the stretch?

“My confidence is really high. I look back at the program we took over that was 1-11. And then the first year in 2018 we went 1-7 in the conference and our average margin of defeat was 21 points,” Bloomgren said, looking back before addressing the here and now.

“The last three weeks prior to today we beat the defending conference champs and then in addition to that, we went to overtime twice. So I’d say that’s growth. Now we’ve got to take another step. We got to win those games. And that’s what we’re working towards.”

The team has talent. They’ve won some big games. If they can pull things together and close things out on a positive note, they’ll have achieved tangible growth in each successive season. It’s just been much harder and taken much longer than anyone on South Main would have liked.

Bloomgren called those big picture progress checks “conversations for after the year”, reverting his attention back to UTEP. Rice beat the Miners in El Paso the last time these two teams met. If conversations of tangible growth are still in the cards, finding a way to dig out another win against the Miners now seems like a must.

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Rice Football: Mike Bloomgren reacts to UTSA loss

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Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren met with the media following his teams’ discouraging loss to UTSA. Here are his words as he discusses the game.

We’re going to do this a little bit differently this week. Oftentimes, this is the space for a postgame featurette recapping the most recent game and delving into an aspect or two that proved important or consequential in some form. This week, this column will be reserved for the words of Rice football head coach Mike Bloomgren himself in his postgame comments with the media following the Owls’ 45-0 loss to UTSA. No need to dress it up. Here’s the head man himself:

Opening Statement

“Obviously not how we wanted this game to go, not how we planned for this game to go. We got taken to the woodshed. They beat us pretty good tonight. And we got outcoached and got outplayed — out-executed — it’s hard to say outplayed because I think our guys always play hard, but we had too much error in our game and made a lot of mistakes. And we paid dearly for them against a very, very good football team. We’ve got a lot of work to do if we want to continue to talk about ascending as a program. I think our fans deserve better. And we’re going to work our butts off to give it to them.”

On the loss coming directly following a bye week

“I think [the bye week] allowed us to feel really good about the gameplan; that allowed us to feel like we were in a really good place. And coming off two wins, you felt like we were taking positive steps, and tonight certainly was not a positive step. I think the only thing that I would point to tonight is that I thought our guys were really into the game for each other, they were playing for each other, and they were encouraging each other throughout the whole game. I think that’s where magic starts but nothing’s fun when you get beat like that, right?

There’s encouragement. There’s fight to the end. But we have to play better. We are in this to win. Coming out of the bye, thought we’d play a lot better than we did tonight, and we didn’t really execute on defense star standard and obviously offense was really bad.”

On what needs to change regarding the slow starts

“It’s probably confidence as much as anything. We are still fragile. We are still learning how to consistently win. And we’ve got to get to the point where when something bad happens, we set our jaw and when we say like, let’s go to the next play, let’s worry about what we can actually control, which is the next play, not the ones that have already happened. I think that’s something that we got to continue to work on. We are talking about it a good bit. And until we can get our confidence, I think that’s what we got to do. We got to find a way to make our own confidence, to earn our own confidence, and that’s why you practice, that’s why you do things in practice, that’s why you try to make those things really hard. But right now, we’re not able to shift the tide.

Momentum is such a big deal in this world. And I feel like when we get momentum rolling our way, we’re pretty fun. We have a lot of fun on the field and we’re scoring points and stopping people. We got to find a way to make that momentum go our way early in games.”

On what adjustments needs to be made moving forward

“I think that we’re gonna have to let this thing hurt, and we’re gonna have to learn from these corrections that these coaches will make on Monday and we better put a great game plan together for UAB. Because it’s not like they’re not the defendant conference champs…

We’ve got to make sure we have a complete understanding of what we’re doing, give our kids the best chance, and then we have to go execute. So we got to find out what we can execute at a high enough level to beat a team in Conference USA. And that’s what we need to do on offense and defense right now, whatever we’re good enough at. If we need to simplify, we need to simplify. If we need to do more, then we need to do more, we need to get more scheme. But again, it’s really heartbreaking to me for our players because I do think they’re playing really hard, they’re just not always playing well.”

On what needs to improve on offense

“I mean, look at those numbers. Gosh, we threw for 36 yards. We’ve got to make sure that we’re catching the ball when we throw it. We’ve got to throw it to the right place. We’ve got to throw it to the open guy. There’s not going to be a lot of magic here, but we also got to protect better. That’s where it’s always going to start for us. If we can protect the passer, we believe in our guys to take a drop and find the guy that’s open. But as I said we had a couple big drops that are disappointing, but we’ve got a long way to go in the throw game that we’ve got to improve on.”

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