Of the 41 states in the union that have a Football Bowl Subdivision team within their borders, none have more than Texas.
For 12 days, as teams nationwide dig into preseason drills, USA TODAY Sports’ college football reporters are traversing the state of Texas and visiting each of its one dozen FBS programs. AT&T presents Two Weeks in Texas …
Day 8: Rice
HOUSTON — When last football season ended, one of Rice’s best players sought counsel from his coach. Opportunity was knocking, and Brian Nordstrom wasn’t sure what to do. A walk-on who had become an all-Conference USA defensive end, Nordstrom had to weigh staying in school for a potentially great senior season vs. a big-money chance to go pro.
His coach, David Bailiff, told him: That’s why you came to Rice. And Nordstrom accepted the “six-figure” job offer from Centurion Pipeline, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Company. Today, as his former teammates prepare for the 2015 season, he’s several months into his professional career, putting his civil engineering degree to use.
“As a head coach, you try to make decisions working with the football team as to how I would work with my son,” says Bailiff, who’s preparing for his ninth season as the Owls’ head coach. “And if my son got an offer like that, I’d probably have to tell him to entertain it. If you know you’re not gonna play in the NFL, that’s why you come to school.”
Rice defensive end Brian Nordstrom sacks Southern Miss quarterback Nick Mullins in a 41-23 Owls win last season (Chuck Cook / USA TODAY Sports)
At the same time Nordstrom was considering his future, Christian Covington was, too. A junior defensive tackle for the Owls, he declared for the NFL Draft and was a sixth-round pick by the Houston Texans). And there, in two guys leaving early — both would have been integral parts of the 2015 team — is what Rice football is and wants to be.
“The notion we could send someone early to the NFL Draft and early to corporate America is exactly the type of program we want to build,” Rice athletic director Joe Karlgaard says.
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For Rice to tout graduation rates at or very near 100 percent for its football teams is routine. What’s new — or renewed from long ago — is winning.
After years of futility, the Owls are riding three consecutive bowl appearances. They’ve won 25 games in the past three seasons, reviving a proud history that had long since faded.
TWO WEEKS IN TEXAS: The series so far
Rice isn’t likely to become a national power again, as it was in the first half of the 20th century. With an undergraduate enrollment of less than 4,000 — excepting the military academies, only the University of Tulsa has a smaller enrollment among FBS schools — Rice has a small alumni base. But the Owls’ recent success has fueled optimism, at least on the picturesque campus, that academic prowess and winning football can mesh.
Time will tell whether it’s sustainable or just a nice blip. But Bailiff arrived in 2007 with the belief it could happen. He points to the 2008 season, when the Owls won 10 games for the first time since 1949, as the breakthrough. Rice dipped to 2-10 the next year, and was 4-8 in both 2010 and 2011. But beginning in 2012, the Owls have put together three consecutive winning seasons. In 2013, they went 10-4 and won Conference USA, their first outright conference championship since 1957.
In more than one way, coach David Bailiff has supreme confidence in his players at Rice. (Erich Schlegel / USA TODAY Sports)
Bailiff points to an infusion of talented recruiting classes after that 2008 season. There’s also been unprecedented stability in the coaching staff — no one has left for the last two seasons, and he was replaced by internal promotion. Whatever, the long downtrodden program has begun to find success.
“We believe we can play football at the highest level,” Bailiff says. “We believe every year we’re getting better.”
And they believe they’re doing it, he adds, “while holding the values of the university intact.”
As one example: Bailiff regularly shifts practice times to accommodate players’ class schedules or allows guys to arrive late or leave early for lab sessions.
“They have to post high GPAs to get into the medical schools they want or the law schools they want,” he says. “And there’s times they’re just gonna have to miss practice. That’s part of it here.”
Darik Dillard, a junior running back from San Antonio, says the Owls’ mindset is different than most of their FBS peers.
“You don’t see your only purpose of going to Rice as being an athlete,” says Dillard, who followed his older brother Jarett, an All-America receiver who went on to play in the NFL. “You really take the importance of being a student and doing well in your classes. … You understand you’re not gonna be treated like a celebrity here. You’re just like any student.”
To find qualified candidates who can also play, the coaching staff annually holds satellite camps across Texas. The typical attendees are kids who believe they’ll qualify for admission; the camps essentially allow Bailiff and company to quickly narrow their focus. They don’t typically cast a wide net — though freshman receiver Lance Wright, who’s from North Pole, Alaska, and has been making waves early during preseason practices, is a notable exception.
There are no hard and fast entrance requirements, but instead a “holistic” admission process that examines an applicant’s academic résumé along with an array of extracurricular activities.
“If a young man has a 32 on the ACT, we’re probably good there,” Bailiff says. “If he’s got a 26, he probably needs to be an Eagle Scout.”
The overriding principle, according to Bailiff, is this: “The worst thing you can do here is bring in a young man you’re not sure can make it academically, because there’s no place to hide academically here.”
To qualified prospects, Bailiff and his coaches pitch the value of a degree from Rice, with its reputation as one of the nation’s best universities. Bailiff tells recruits and their parents that five years after graduation, he expects them to be the boss. Ten years out, he expects them to be successful enough pay back their scholarship in donations.
Rice has high expectations for its players, on the field and in the boardroom. (Erich Schlegel / USA TODAY Sports)
“After 30 or 40 years, we expect you to name a building after yourself,” says Bailiff, and as a current example, Rice alum Brian Patterson, who played football for the Owls in the 1980s, provided the gift for a $31.5 million, 60,000-square-foot football facility currently under construction in the north end zone of Rice Stadium.
Bailiff says Rice attracts players “able to make a 50- and 60-year decision. … They understand the purpose of college is to prepare for life, and so we get guys that want to be engineers and doctors and lawyers – that also want to win football games.”
For much of Rice’s recent history, that last part has been difficult.
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Rice once was coached by John Heisman, and from 1934-57, the Owls won six Southwest Conference titles. But as enrollments of their rivals like Texas and Texas A&M grew, it became more difficult for the Owls to compete. On Sept. 12, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy made a major address at Rice Stadium — known forever after as the “We choose to go to the moon” speech — he asked:
“Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?
“Why does Rice play Texas?
“We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
When the Southwest Conference disbanded, with four members joining with Big Eight members to form the Big 12, Rice was left out. After years in the Western Athletic Conference, the Owls have found a home in Conference USA.
In 2004, a subcommittee of Rice’s board of trustees studied Rice athletics, evaluating options that included moving down from FBS (then known as Division I-A) to a lower level — or even dropping football entirely. The report’s authors wrote, “There are … no easy answers for Rice. The tradition and history of the institution are inextricably linked to its participation in ‘big time’ sports.” And ultimately, that linkage remained.
The current run is proof, according to the Owls, that it can work.
“I think it’s a different value proposition we offer than most schools playing in FBS,” Karlgaard says. “It’s not for everybody. On the other hand, there are enough kids that aspire to be great in both realms that we can go out and offer them an experience that’s unparalleled in many ways.”
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As the 2015 season approaches, there’s quiet confidence evident in the program — a reflection of that recent success — and a recognition that expectations have grown. The initial goal was to play in a bowl game. In 2006, a year before Bailiff arrived and during Todd Graham’s one year as head coach, the Owls went to the New Orleans Bowl, their first postseason appearance since 1961. They’ve been four times under Bailiff.
Rice quarterback Driphus Jackson is one of the more underrated players in Conference USA. (Erich Schlegel / USA TODAY Sports)
The next goal was to beat Power Five opponents; they’ve beaten Kansas twice, and Purdue. And the final piece is to win conference titles, consistently achieve a Top 25 ranking and contend for the Group of Five’s automatic berth in a New Year’s Six bowl.
“We want to be in that discussion and eventually to get in,” Karlgaard says.
If that seems like a long shot, if meshing academics and football to even sustain the current run seems like an arduous task, well — who, having watched Rice football over the past several decades, would have predicted three consecutive winning seasons? Dillard, for one, looks to the past for inspiration. He sometimes stands at the 50-yard line in Rice Stadium and considers what Kennedy said there on Sept. 12, 1962.
“He stood right here and asked, ‘Why do we go to the moon?’ ” Dillard says, and then answers: “Because it is hard.’ ”
Rice plays Texas on Sept. 12.
