With the opening of USF’s football season less than two months away, Green, Gold, and Bold has examined each opponent the Bulls will face in the 2025 season.
Today, we reach the last opponent in the series.
Team: Rice Owls
When: Saturday, November 29, Time TBA, at Raymond James Stadium.
Head coach: Scott Abell. He replaces Mike Bloomgren, who was fired after eight games in the 2024 season. Bloomgren was 24-52 with the Owls, so we can deduce that the school administration is patient.
Rice hires Davidson coach Scott Abell as another Group of Five job is filled https://t.co/rUhscv0hW9 pic.twitter.com/WECUvW7tFI
— College Sports Wire (@College_Wire) November 29, 2024
Last year’s record: 4-8, including 3-5 in the American Athletic Conference. One of those wins was a stinging 35-28 upset of USF in the last game of the regular season while the Owls played under an interim head coach. That one left a mark on the Bulls.
Name to know: Chase Jenkins. He’s the leader to become the starting quarterback. It will be his job to make Abell’s spread offense go. Jenkins has had a strange time at Rice. He was a quarterback as a freshman, then switched to wide receiver as a sophomore, and now he’s back at quarterback.
He hasn’t had much playing time. Jenkins threw only 19 passes as a freshman, and he appeared in just two games last season to preserve his redshirt.
The biggest potential weakness: Given Abell’s commitment to the spread offense, the Owls could be in big trouble in games where they trail by more than a touchdown. This team won’t be built to throw the ball.
The AAC had eight teams last season that averaged more than 30 points per game. Rice was not one of them.
The biggest question mark: Abell was a strong hire when Rice plucked him from Davidson, where he was 47-28 since 2018 and reached the FCS playoffs three times. He was also 39-24 at Washington & Lee. The common links between those two schools are their high academic standards and the difficulty they had in winning before Abell arrived.
As Pete Thamel noted on ESPN, “sources said (that) made him an attractive candidate to the Rice brass.”
So, what’s the question about this?
Simple. It’s one thing to have a spread option offense run over top of teams in the Pioneer League. AAC defenses will have more bite, especially after they get some tape on the Owls.
Interesting things to know: The Owls haven’t had a winning season since 2014, when they finished 8-5 and won the Hawaii Bowl.
When Abell arrived on campus to take over the program last November, he established a WE culture: win everything, win everywhere, and with everyone.
Before he got into football coaching, Abell was a catcher/3b in the Kansas City Royals organization.
The Rice campus, located near downtown Houston, is home to just 8,566 students. However, that’s not the smallest enrollment in the conference.
Tulsa has just 3,769 students, and the Naval Academy and West Point also have about half the enrollment that Rice does.