(03-15-2017 12:03 PM)Eagle9 Wrote: Thinks it's already been discussed here. But the talent at Rice has seen a big drop off the last 2 or 3 years. While they haven't dominated for several years, they still had more pitching than anybody else in the conference every year. They suffered a lot of injuries to their pitching staff 3 or 4 years ago that kept them from being an elite team. Now I just don't think they have the horses they normally do. They still have talent near the top of C-USA, but not nearly enough to dominate the way they did for a while.
The decline has been there for a while in terms of on-field performance. Surprisingly, they have not even been close (within a game) to winning a Regional in the last seven years--going down in 2 or 3 games most of those years. And it has been nine years since their last CWS appearance.
I just haven't really thought of them as being that dominant in conference play in a while. Since their first three years when they were going 22-2 each season against a stronger conference, they have been winning around 65-70 percent of their games in conference. 21-9/22-8 is damn impressive but not really dominant. It is kind of hard for me to see a dropoff over the last three or four years because the dropoff in the early 2010's was so significant and I've kind of wondered when the down year was coming. That said, they seem to always tie enough together to win the conference even when I thought they weren't.
In terms of talent: I'd be interested to see their draft picks over the last several years. It feels like they have gradually lost the depth they used to have on the mound. There's still that one ace starter and a great reliever but a guy like Duplantier last year would have been a #2 or 3 starter and their middle relief was better. And given that they were generally not an offensive powerhouse even in their best years, that dropoff hurts big time.
It definitely looks like more of a dropoff this year that has combined with Graham's brutal early season scheduling to lead to this. It is hard to guess how they stack up this year to the rest of the conference because you cannot compare their competition so far to anyone else's. However, this is certainly the worst they have handled that early schedule.
Rice can still be a damn good program that makes a Regional every year and win the conference most years (rather than every year). But I think their days of consistently being a top 10-15 Omaha contender that is head-and-shoulders above everyone in the conference are long gone.
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RPI/T25 Rankings Watch Thread 5/28
