(04-07-2023 06:34 PM)WRCisforgotten79 Wrote: The problem for Rice is that it was not "grandfathered in" to a P5 conference as Northwestern, Stanford and Vanderbilt were. No more Southwest Conference created an issue for Rice, notwithstanding Rice's unwillingness in the 1990s to do anything meaningful with respect to facilities, other than Reckling.
Rice could have been grandfathered in if they had only been willing to keep up with its peers athletically. The problem was the Rice business model of selling out when LSU it TexasU came to town to play football, and running a skinflint athletic program off whatever that brought in. Then when Rice quit playing LSU annually in the 1970s and TexasU left for the XII in the 1990s, that income stream dried up with nothing to replace it.
After Knodel won the SWC in 1970, Rice really had a tremendous opportunity to make like Duke. Take the lead in bringing in Black athletes, instead of being a follower, and Rice could have dominated an SWC that really didn't seem to care much about basketball. Do that and when the TV money started to hit basketball (after the UH-UCLA game in the Dome in 1968), Rice would have opened a major income channel outside of playing TexasU and LSU at home in football in alternate years. But by the time Houston and Guy V joined the SWC, and TexasU and Arkansas brought in Abe Lemons and Eddie Sutton, that window was gone.
The world of intercollegiate athletics changed around 1970 with the proliferation of post-season and TV money. Stanford and Duke made the commitment to move forward, followed eventually by Vandy and Northwestern. Rice just kept trying to pinch pennies until the whole Rice athletic program became a bad joke. So Rice got left behind by the XII and then by the Denver Airport gang. But anybody paying attention in the 1970s and 1980s saw this coming a mile away.
The one thing that I have always wondered about is what was the deal with Kenneth Pitzer. The Rice old-timers will claim that he ran Jess off because he intended to kill Rice athletics. But he went to Stanford in 1968-1971, and his presidency there pretty much coincided with the time frame in which Stanford decided to play with the big boys instead of squeezing nickels until the buffalo farted (yes, I use that analogy a lot, but as someone who was asked to sleep in double beds with a teammate on golf trips, I saw it up close and personal). Stanford won the 1971 and 1972 Rose Bowls, while Rice won 14 football games in the 5 years 1967-1971 (4, 0, 3, 5, 2), to give an idea of how far apart the programs were by the early 1970s. So why did two universities take such divergent paths under one president?
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HRS / EZF Athletics + Campus Construction Thread
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