(11-18-2018 03:32 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  Yeah, the Patterson Center is nice/fine it’s nothing that every other school doesn’t have.

You have to continually invest. We still don’t have an on-campus indoor facility which is bad for a school of our stature.

The thing about that is that it’d help ALL sports, not just football.

I don’t think we’ll ever invest enough in athletics to build an indoor facility. We can use the Texans so it won’t ever be a priority.

If we did decide to make that investment... I think it should be included in the renovation of the west side stands. It’s far from campus but that’s the only place I think Rice would stomach it. Put it where the bike track is. Include a track and tell students beer bike will never be rained out again.

I wonder how long until we knock down Tudor. Athletics are going to keep getting pushed to the far side of campus and that is going to be a “gateway to the med center”.

I'd say the track/soccer stadium is in more danger of being razed than Tudor. That's prime Medical Center real estate right there. You could build that stadium on the west side of the football stadium too.

Does it matter what end of the campus new facilities are on?

If done correctly, you could build an indoor facility for football, indoor track, soccer, and intramural sports. It could benfit both the athletes and students.

I would be very surprised if we wind up with an indoor Athletics facility for Beer Bike. About 8 years ago, they explored moving the balloon fight to HRS as a way to keep easier watch on all the over-inebriated students. The idea was nixed when Athletics found that the cost of cleaning sick out of the artificial turf would have been in the tens of thousands.

(11-18-2018 03:10 PM)Frizzy Owl Wrote:  The EZF brought Rice facilities up to par with G5. It's not so much a question of how much better recruiting is with the EZF, as a question of how much worse recruiting would be without it. But no matter how good the facilities, it isn't the buildings that do the recruiting, it's the coaches.

The problem is that it was sold and treated as the missing link, the one thing we needed to take the next step. And those decisions were disastrous, as expected. Nothing wrong with building facilities, but their impact is fairly limited in the best case scenario and downright irrelevant in the worst case (which we routinely find ourselves in).

The EZF was never going to fix Rice Athletics any more than new uniforms and seats are for Air India. The sooner we separate facility building from staffing and other like-strategic decisons, the better.

(11-18-2018 04:02 PM)cr11owl Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 03:32 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  Yeah, the Patterson Center is nice/fine it’s nothing that every other school doesn’t have.

You have to continually invest. We still don’t have an on-campus indoor facility which is bad for a school of our stature.

The thing about that is that it’d help ALL sports, not just football.

I don’t think we’ll ever invest enough in athletics to build an indoor facility. We can use the Texans so it won’t ever be a priority.

If we did decide to make that investment... I think it should be included in the renovation of the west side stands. It’s far from campus but that’s the only place I think Rice would stomach it. Put it where the bike track is. Include a track and tell students beer bike will never be rained out again.

I wonder how long until we knock down Tudor. Athletics are going to keep getting pushed to the far side of campus and that is going to be a “gateway to the med center”.

It’s just pretty pathetic that many 6A DFW HS’s have indoors and we can’t “afford” one.

Interestingly, not as many Houston area high schools have one.

(11-18-2018 08:49 PM)Antarius Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 03:10 PM)Frizzy Owl Wrote:  The EZF brought Rice facilities up to par with G5. It's not so much a question of how much better recruiting is with the EZF, as a question of how much worse recruiting would be without it. But no matter how good the facilities, it isn't the buildings that do the recruiting, it's the coaches.

The problem is that it was sold and treated as the missing link, the one thing we needed to take the next step. And those decisions were disastrous, as expected. Nothing wrong with building facilities, but their impact is fairly limited in the best case scenario and downright irrelevant in the worst case (which we routinely find ourselves in).

The EZF was never going to fix Rice Athletics any more than new uniforms and seats are for Air India. The sooner we separate facility building from staffing and other like-strategic decisons, the better.

Commitment is really easy when OPM is involved. You can only wonder what Patterson was promised.

BTW, if you don't know OPM stands for other people's money

(11-18-2018 10:23 AM)Middle Ages Wrote:  General thoughts-
-Aston Walter has been so under-utilized during his career. To some extent Austin too. So hard to recruit talent like that and then we waste it
-Based on this game it seems to me that D'Angelo Ellis should be a receiver full time (maybe he is?). With the ability he showed last night- the combination of him, Cephus, and Trammel could be a pretty good WR group.
-Based on one special teams tackle maybe Jordan Myers should be playing defense. We need more talent on that side of the ball
-the freshmen on defense are encouraging. We still need more talent on the line and in general speed across the field, but I like the looks of the new guys at safety and linebacker
- as we have known for some time OL and QB are the weakest links and have to be addressed in the offseason. I bet we see some juco's there.

We got a grad transfer for QB and that surely was not the answer. This offense/academic load is tough can't imagine JUCO is the answer. If some JR/SR are transferring what program would they go to? If they didn't put the work/passion here I don't think their work ethic is going to change at another school.

Who is going to be QB this weekend? I'm not a TJ fan but Dude deserves a start. If our running game is not working and we are scared to pass...Just run TJ

(11-19-2018 03:34 PM)Hank16 Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 10:23 AM)Middle Ages Wrote:  General thoughts-
-Aston Walter has been so under-utilized during his career. To some extent Austin too. So hard to recruit talent like that and then we waste it
-Based on this game it seems to me that D'Angelo Ellis should be a receiver full time (maybe he is?). With the ability he showed last night- the combination of him, Cephus, and Trammel could be a pretty good WR group.
-Based on one special teams tackle maybe Jordan Myers should be playing defense. We need more talent on that side of the ball
-the freshmen on defense are encouraging. We still need more talent on the line and in general speed across the field, but I like the looks of the new guys at safety and linebacker
- as we have known for some time OL and QB are the weakest links and have to be addressed in the offseason. I bet we see some juco's there.

We got a grad transfer for QB and that surely was not the answer. This offense/academic load is tough can't imagine JUCO is the answer. If some JR/SR are transferring what program would they go to? If they didn't put the work/passion here I don't think their work ethic is going to change at another school.

Who is going to be QB this weekend? I'm not a TJ fan but Dude deserves a start. If our running game is not working and we are scared to pass...Just run TJ

Some can handle it.

(11-19-2018 03:54 PM)ruowls Wrote:  

(11-19-2018 03:34 PM)Hank16 Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 10:23 AM)Middle Ages Wrote:  General thoughts-
-Aston Walter has been so under-utilized during his career. To some extent Austin too. So hard to recruit talent like that and then we waste it
-Based on this game it seems to me that D'Angelo Ellis should be a receiver full time (maybe he is?). With the ability he showed last night- the combination of him, Cephus, and Trammel could be a pretty good WR group.
-Based on one special teams tackle maybe Jordan Myers should be playing defense. We need more talent on that side of the ball
-the freshmen on defense are encouraging. We still need more talent on the line and in general speed across the field, but I like the looks of the new guys at safety and linebacker
- as we have known for some time OL and QB are the weakest links and have to be addressed in the offseason. I bet we see some juco's there.

We got a grad transfer for QB and that surely was not the answer. This offense/academic load is tough can't imagine JUCO is the answer. If some JR/SR are transferring what program would they go to? If they didn't put the work/passion here I don't think their work ethic is going to change at another school.

Who is going to be QB this weekend? I'm not a TJ fan but Dude deserves a start. If our running game is not working and we are scared to pass...Just run TJ

Some can handle it.

Many have.

(11-18-2018 09:43 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 04:02 PM)cr11owl Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 03:32 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  Yeah, the Patterson Center is nice/fine it’s nothing that every other school doesn’t have.

You have to continually invest. We still don’t have an on-campus indoor facility which is bad for a school of our stature.

The thing about that is that it’d help ALL sports, not just football.

I don’t think we’ll ever invest enough in athletics to build an indoor facility. We can use the Texans so it won’t ever be a priority.

If we did decide to make that investment... I think it should be included in the renovation of the west side stands. It’s far from campus but that’s the only place I think Rice would stomach it. Put it where the bike track is. Include a track and tell students beer bike will never be rained out again.

I wonder how long until we knock down Tudor. Athletics are going to keep getting pushed to the far side of campus and that is going to be a “gateway to the med center”.

It’s just pretty pathetic that many 6A DFW HS’s have indoors and we can’t “afford” one.

Interestingly, not as many Houston area high schools have one.

Yeah, my DFW high school has had an indoor facility for between 10 to 15 years. As you said above, it helped and was utilized by all sports teams at my school.

(11-18-2018 02:41 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 01:58 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  

(11-18-2018 12:23 PM)Neelys Ghost Wrote:  yeah... Kids played great... If we can hurry up and get all these Juniors and Seniors to graduate, quit, or transfer then we will get really good. Might cover more spreads...

The upperclassmen, frankly, haven't shown much under two entirely different coaching staffs and two entirely different sets of schemes now. The idea that there's some untested approach just sitting out there that would have turned them into worldbeaters is a fantasy. Coaching has been a part of why they're 2-22, but the players are a part of it, too. I'm sorry for their experience here -- they didn't sign on to be part of a rebuild, but there's no getting around the fact that they're part of why a rebuild is needed.

I think the real story is how little the EZF has contributed to our recruiting. Early 2015, we were coming off 3 straight bowls, 2 of the 3 bowl wins, and one conference championship, with the EZF finally becoming a reality, and instead of peaking, our recruiting went into the toilet. We are not going to recover in a year.

That is not a statement that we should not have done it. It is merely a statement that we need more than that.

SMU did something a lot more extensive that we did, and have since gone through Cavan, Bennett, Jones, Morris, and now Dykes without finding a magic bullet.

As noted in another post, the Walters were quite possibly the best recruits we've gotten recently, and we pretty much wasted them.

Yes, the Walters are very talented and have been both under-utilized. Would argue that's true for many others who are less obvious. Part of the reason our players are inconsistent is that they get yanked around or benched for who-knows what reason. Again, I go back to the first three games where the offense actually had some mojo with "less talented" receivers who've hardly been thrown a ball since. The rotating QB situation, for instance, makes not having a good QB even worse as the timing, the receivers and game flow are thrown off. Tyner comes in for one play at LSU is gone. He throws harder, faster, further than the other QBs. D'Angelo is surely one of the fastest guys on the field. While Tyner didn't throw a perfect ball to D'Angelo, Tyner didn't get sacked and it was a heck of a lot better than any other pass that night or attempting to run it up the gut for the nth time. Nothing to lose by letting Tyner/D'angelo try again. Then, Tyner and D'Angelo probably felt like they were being punished for not completing the pass. So, instead of building confidence or "flow", the exact opposite transpired. This is only one example but it perfectly captures a big problem with the coaching.

(11-18-2018 09:43 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  It’s just pretty pathetic that many 6A DFW HS’s have indoors and we can’t “afford” one.

Interestingly, not as many Houston area high schools have one.

Might Houston's higher winter temps and less ice/snow be the reason for fewer H-Town indoor facilities than in DFW?

(But what about the higher temps/humidity in late spring and early fall?)