McCaffrey was the only first teamer which I get. Actually there were quite a few good receivers in the league so it was nice he was one of the three first teamers.
But no Owls on the second or third team? Seems a bit of a slight. We were pretty close to Tulane and SMU yet somehow they dominated the first three teams.
Morrison, Taylor, Connors and Pearcy were HM. Connors and Taylor deserved a better selection IMO. Connors had seven touchdowns in the eight conference games (one more than Luke). Coco and perhaps one OL (Servin?) probably deserved HM too.
I need to go back and look at the stats but JT Daniels IMO is one of the top three QBs in the league hands down.
I also get that he probably just missed too many games to receive this recognition.
I also think that across all positions that probably players from the new teams got the short end
I went to the AAC website to see if there were any Rice players chosen for their pre-season all conference teams and could not find the press release, but I seem to remember that no Owl was picked on any of the levels. (may be a faulty memory, perhaps the AAC doesn't have a pre-season list). However, there were 9 Owls projected to be on one of the 4 levels of all-AAC teams on Phil Steel's annual listing. Pearcy, Luke, Morrison and Taylor were projected 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th teams respectively, there was no mention of Dean Connors (
https://riceowls.com/news/2023/6/13/foot...aac-team).
I do remember that ESPN analytics picked the Owls to be dead last in the AAC and the American Preseason Poll had the Owls 12th, ahead of only South Florida and Charlotte. (
https://theamerican.org/news/2023/7/24/f...oll.aspx). The Owls did outperform the prognosticators expectations.
We didn't play Memphis, I haven't seen enough of their QB. I doubt he's better than JT. But missing the final two conference games and having some of his best games out of conference, put him behind UTSA, Tulane, and SMU's QB's. JT is probably the best pure QB in the conference. It's possible he has eligibility left, somehow.
Phil Steele (who usually does a better job on the all conference teams than the conference itself) had eight Owls on the all AAC teams.
McCaffrey first team. Connors, Carroll, Pearcy and Taylor third team. And Devones, Banks and Servin fourth team.
That’s probably closer to how I would have selected things, although I think Coco was better on the DL than Carroll.