110 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
There’s a trophy in the Rice baseball offices. It’s from 2006, the Owls’ first season in Conference USA. On the front, it reads “C-USA 2006 Baseball Tournament Champions.” On either side are the logos of nine schools.
Grace Forbes has a sweatshirt that she would wear before every race. Her grandfather, who died when she was young, bought it as a souvenir at the 1998 Rose Bowl, before it was passed on to her.
When San Diego State University guard Lamont Butler hit a corner jumpshot with time expiring – the first buzzer beater in Final Four history hit while trailing – to beat Florida Atlantic University in the men’s college basketball national semifinal, the Owls weren’t the only ones whose plans he foiled.
Patrick Hallmark has walked out of the Reckling Park dugout some 250 times, but the last nine have been from the visitor’s side. Hallmark, who played for Rice before returning to coach the Owls, served as an assistant under former head coach Wayne Graham from 2006 through 2016. Now the head coach of the University of Texas at San Antonio, Hallmark said returning to Rice feels different.
The Rice women’s basketball team couldn’t replicate their 2021 Women’s National Invitational Tournament title run this time around, falling in the second round to the University of Oregon. The Owls kicked off their tournament with a 71-67 win over Brigham Young University on Friday and looked to be on their way towards a second straight road victory on Monday before a relentless third-quarter push by the Ducks gave the hosts a comfortable 78-53 win. Despite the loss, head coach Lindsay Edmonds said she was proud of her team for holding their own in the second most important postseason tournament in the sport.
If college basketball games lasted 40 minutes and half a second, the Rice men’s basketball team’s season would be over right now. After leading nearly the entire game against the No. 11 seed University of Texas at San Antonio in their opening game of the Conference USA tournament, the No. 6 seed Owls allowed UTSA to close the margin to one before guard Japhet Medor drove the length of the court with time expiring, getting his layup to roll in. The initial ruling was that Medor had gotten his shot off just before the clock hit zero, but the call was reversed after a two-and-a-half minute review, giving Rice a 72-71 win.
The Rice baseball team got a statement win on a big stage, beating No. 24 Texas Tech University 3-2 on Friday to open the Shriners’ College Classic at Minute Maid Park. But the rest of the weekend didn’t go as planned, and the Owls dropped games to No. 15 Texas A&M University and No. 10 Texas Christian University in lopsided fashion, bringing their record to 4-7.
Paul Janish is now undefeated, but the same can’t be said for No. 24 Texas Tech University. Rice’s associate head coach stepped in for head coach Jose Cruz Jr., who missed Friday’s game with a personal matter, and guided the Owls to a 3-2 win over the previously 10-0 Red Raiders to open the Owls’ weekend-long residence at Minute Maid Park.
Twenty years ago, Stanford University was the second-best team in college baseball. The Cardinal finished that season as runners-up in the College World Series, falling short to a team from a small Texas school – Rice. Two decades later, Stanford is once again the No. 2 team in college baseball – this time according to the weekly D1Baseball poll and not postseason results – but the Owls haven’t sniffed the rankings in over half a decade.
While he was in Mobile, Ala., preparing his team for Rice’s first bowl appearance in eight years, head coach Mike Bloomgren was also working on another project. JT Daniels, a former five-star recruit who started three games for the University of Georgia’s 2021 national championship team, had just entered the transfer portal and Bloomgren wanted to lure the then-West Virginia University quarterback to South Main.
Wayne Graham lives in Austin now. A lifelong Houstonian, the former Rice baseball coach decided to move three hours west in 2020 after spending nearly each of the first 84 years of his life in the Bayou City. But according to Graham, who left the Owls after 27 seasons in 2018, he doesn’t miss his hometown.
Quincy Olivari got hit by a car once. Two summers ago, Rice’s now-junior guard was biking in Hawaii when a driver ran a stop sign and sent him flying onto the pavement. But according to Olivari, while he couldn’t dodge the car, he did dodge a proverbial bullet.
Rice’s women’s basketball team got off to a ridiculous start this year. The Owls won their first nine games, their best-ever start to a season in program history. They weren’t just beating up on an easy non-conference schedule either. The Owls beat a pair of power-five teams in Texas A&M University and Texas Christian University, in addition to a win over the American Athletic Conference’s University of Houston (although admittedly all three of those higher-profile teams are having down years).
If momentum really is as powerful a force in sports as countless armchair coaches and talking heads would claim, someone forgot to tell Rice junior guard Travis Evee. Up by five with 30 seconds to go, the Owls men’s basketball team allowed a quick basket, turned the ball over, allowed another layup, turned the ball over once more and committed a foul with six seconds remaining to give the University of Texas at El Paso a chance to take the lead with two free throws. The Miners’ Tae Hardy hit both free throws, and Rice, now trailing by one, appeared on the verge of a collapse of somewhere between normal and epic proportions. But Evee told “uncle Mo” to sit down, driving the length of the court to sink a left-handed floater as time expired to give the Owls a whiplash-inducing 83-82 win.
A year and a half ago, in an interview, Rice’s head football coach Mike Bloomgren told me about his proudest memory from his days as Stanford University offensive coordinator. On the back of a New Year’s Day 45-16 thrashing of the University of Iowa in the Rose Bowl, the Cardinal ended the season ranked No. 3 in the country. Bloomgren thought that ranking was significant since Stanford had also cracked the top-four in that year’s U.S. News and World Report college rankings, meaning that his players had gotten the rare chance to play for a world-class football team while receiving a world-class education.
When junior guard Travis Evee’s shot from near half-court found the net at the buzzer to send their game against Louisiana Tech University on Thursday night into overtime, Rice men’s basketball head coach Scott Pera said he thought his team had been given new life.
Quarterback JT Daniels, a former five-star recruit who has started 29 games across stints with the University of Southern California, University of Georgia and West Virginia University, will transfer to Rice. Daniels joins an incoming class that ranks No. 80 in the NCAA according to 247Sports’s composite rankings, as of the start of the early signing period on Wednesday. According to head coach Mike Bloomgren, Daniels is one of the best quarterbacks he’s ever recruited going back to his time as offensive coordinator at Stanford University.
Rice’s 38-24 loss to the University of Southern Mississippi in the LendingTree Bowl on Saturday was listed on ESPN as NCAA Football: Rice vs. Southern Miss. But according to the Owls’ head coach Mike Bloomgren, the broadcast could have just as easily had a different name.
Mike Bloomgren will return next season for his sixth as the head coach of Rice football, an athletic department official confirmed Saturday. While Bloomgren’s initial five-year contract was set to expire this year, the official said that he is under contract for the upcoming year after signing an extension in 2020. The total length of the extension is unknown.
It might not have been how they planned it, but Rice football is going to a bowl game. The Owls will take on the University of Southern Mississippi in the LendingTree Bowl, in Mobile, Alabama on Dec. 17. After finishing the season 5-7, one win shy of the mark needed to secure eligibility, Rice got an invite anyway when not enough teams reached six wins to fill every bowl game. The Owls topped all five-win teams in the tiebreaker, an academic performance metric called Academic Progress Rate.
