(08-28-2020 06:47 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(08-26-2020 11:27 AM)ruowls Wrote:  My first year at Rice we played the defending National Champs (Miami) and played Texas when they were ranked #1. This year Rice was supposed to play the defending National Champ (LSU).
My second year at Rice, we played around the 10th toughest schedule that year in the nation with 2 teams finishing in the top 6, one at 11, one at 17 and 3 more between 22-30. One team started the season in the top 3 but didn't fare so well. I am pretty sure that I just didn't just show up and take up stadium space.

For those who don't remember, that second year included a return matchup against Miami (who were actually better than the previous year), where with 4 minutes left we were taking time out on defense to preserve clock for our offense to try to tie the game up. Unfortunately our defense gave up a TD, and then we gave up another, to put an end to those hopes. But on that day, we competed against a top ten team that was about to put together an amazing run of national champions/contenders.

So yes we did compete, and you were a big part of that. That's not Rice football today, and I'm of the opinion that Rice doesn't want it to be.

This is what people don't remember. They look at 3-8 or even 1-10 or whatever and assume that we weren't good, but that isn't true at all. We just weren't as good as the guys who were overtly cheating at the time

Guys would walk on at other places and were given summer jobs that paid enough for them to pay their tuition... so a backhanded scholarship... and the really good guys were given cars and jobs for their parents. Schools had 125+ people on their rosters.... we had about 85. Injuries were death for us... starters sometimes ran scout teams.

We were probably top 50-75, but unfortunately we played 8 of 11 games against top 30 teams... and 5 of them against top 10 teams.