The Fifth Lap
(10/05/12 12:00am)
During my time here, I have grown to love fall Friday nights at Rice University.
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During my time here, I have grown to love fall Friday nights at Rice University.
During my time at Rice, our rivalry with the University of Houston has seemed, for lack of a better word, forced.
For Rice Men's Basketball, it feels like the dream has been put on hold. I won't say it's over. The program has made too many strides in the five years since their 3 win season in 2007-2008 to just give up on it. But with the recent departures of Arsalan Kazemi and Omar Oraby, the fifth and sixth players to have left the team before the end of their eligibility since last season, the dream feels at least postponed. The dream, for me as a fan, had two basic pieces. Piece one was watching Rice become a specific type of team. Piece two was seeing that team achieve great results. When I say type of team, it's the oldschool, romanticized, story-worthy type of team. It's a team mixing hungry, timetested veterans with fun loving, dynamic young players. It's a team that's cohesive and passionate and plays hard from start to finish. It's a team that can overcome adversity, and that has players who know when to take a game over and when to help a teammate star. It's a team that combines all these things, and goes out to beat teams far more talented on paper. The second piece of that dream is the result. For Rice, that result could be an NCAA or NIT berth, depending on how ambitious you're feeling, but either one would be an exciting step forward. And what's tough to swallow is that at the end of last year, the dream seemed like it might finally be tangible for Rice's men's basketball team. You had the veterans in Kazemi and guard Tamir Jackson. They had been through the growing pains of this program. They had taken the bruising losses, and celebrated in the hallmark victories. And on the court, they seemed to complement each other perfectly. Jackson was cool, collected, and always confident. Kazemi was exciting and contagiously passionate. You had Oraby, the story of untapped talent being transformed. The 7-foot-2-inch Egyptian national came here as a very large man, and grew into an effective player. And you had the young, impact players in Dylan Ennis (who made the C-USA Freshman team), Jarelle Reischel, and Julian DeBose. Last year, they put together a winning record (including a win at Texas A&M), and claimed a post-season tournament berth. And as the season came to a close, you couldn't help but feel like maybe it was a stepping stone to even greater things.Now, of those above, only Jackson and DeBose are left. The reality is that this kind of turnover is more the rule than the exception in college basketball. According to Athletic Director Rick Greenspan, the NCAA saw over 450 basketball transfers in the past year. This is a world where talent isn't expected to stay put, where coaches recruit players with the expectation that they won't stay four years. This is the world where Kentucky wins the national championship with a group of teenage, future first-round picks whose plan was always to turn pro the next year. But at Rice, as with so many other things, to be successful we have to be the exception. We have to recruit and develop players who want to contradict the prevailing trends, players who want to be Rice athletes and Rice students, with everything that comes along with that, for four years. We have to recruit and develop players who understand all the costs and rewards that come with Rice basketball, and are excited by them. The 2012-2013 Rice Owls basketball team might still be exciting. On paper they look undersized and unproven. They are definitely young: the only upperclassman besides Jackson is junior college transfer Austin Ramljak. But it's a team that should be playing with a chip on its shoulder, which should be relishing its opportunity to redefine Rice basketball. It's a group of guys who will be scrappy, creative, and will play hustle basketball. It's a unit with a confident, undisputed leader in Jackson, and with followers who don't know any better but to win basketball games. If they put together a good run, this team could be one of the best sports stories of the spring, even of the year. Until then, though, we're left waiting and wondering about the dream that could have been, the dream could now be coming to a premature end.
This Rice University Owls football team believed. That might be the most gratifying part of last week's 25-24 Rice victory over the University of Kansas. Even though there were plenty of reasons not to, this team traveled to Lawrence believing it could win. Ten-game losing streak? Didn't matter. Never having won against a Big 12 opponent? Didn't matter. A frustrating loss against University of California, Los Angeles (who, on a side note, is looking like a better and better team)? Didn't matter. You could tell before they even got on their buses for the airport that Coach David Bailiff's squad was carrying a certain swagger. Leading up to the game, players were out encouraging students to watch the televised game. That's not something you do if you don't believe you can compete. It's one thing, though, to take that swagger on the bus, and another to maintain it through the ups and downs of a game. And during the sixty minutes in Lawrence, there were plenty of moments where it would have been easy for Rice to let that belief, that swagger, slip away. Thanks to three first quarter turnovers, Rice squandered opportunities to take command of the game early and instead found themselves down 3-10. Still, the swagger remained. At the start of the second half, Kansas put together a long drive to go up 24-13. Still, Rice kept coming.And with less than five minutes left in the contest, Rice missed a potentially game-tying 2-point conversion attempt. But still, the belief persisted. The defense came up with a huge turnover, thanks to sophomore Bryce Callahan's second interception of the game. The offense converted on a critical fourth down in the process of getting into field goal range. And junior Chris Boswell split the uprights for the game winner. Rice never led until the end of the game. But they never stopped believing that they could. There were a lot of football-specific reasons to be excited about this game. The defense prevented the big plays that plagued them over and over again against UCLA. In the Kansas game, they didn't allow a single play over 30 yards. In the season opener, they gave up multiple plays over 70. The offensive line was more cohesive, giving up only two sacks this week, compared to six against UCLA, allowing quarterback junior Taylor McHargue to look downfield. Sophomore Jordan Taylor continued to emerge as a go-to receiver. He had nine catches for 101 yards, the first time he crossed the century mark in his career, and hauled in many of them in big time situations.The tight ends were active in both the running game and passing game, making important receptions and executing key blocks. The offense, as a unit, showed it can march the ball down the field. Its two touchdown drives were of 94 yards and 93 yards respectively. It also put together four drives of 10 plays or more. And Chris Boswell proved that he's not only long-range kicker, but a clutch kicker as well. Where his Kansas counterpart missed two field goals, Boswell went 4 for 4 including the pressure-packed game winner. All of these things bode well for the rest of Rice's season. But more than anything else, I'm excited for a team that dared to get a historic win, and a program that has now beaten a BCSconference opponent two years in a row. After the UCLA game, many fans walked away shaking their heads, saying it was classic Rice football to make it look like it might be close just to find a way to give the game away. But for a week and a half leading up to the Kansas game, and for sixty at-times-trying minutes during it, this Rice football team refused to give into that attitude. They kept believing they could win. And now they've given us a reason to as well.
In high school, I never envisioned myself at a small university.
The dream is over.
When the celebration of the London Olympics kicks off this summer, it will also mark a very somber anniversary. It will mark 40 years and 10 Olympiads since the day that, as one athlete put it, the modern Olympics lost its innocence.
"When you're a fifth-year senior in the last-chance saloon, how can you not check every day?"
Watching the events at Pennsylvania State University unfold over the last two weeks, I find myself surprised by how strong my reaction has been. I've always liked Penn State. My grandparents met there and I have friends who grew up Nittany Lion fans, but I've never been super attached to the school or the football program.
For a few minutes, it looked like we might have actually had a partial government shut down last week.
Since the beginning of the war on terror, many Americans have expressed a concern about "homegrown" radicalized terrorist cells and the best way to prevent them.
Perception is a powerful thing. And perception is a main reason why Bill White replacing Rick Perry as governor of Texas is essential for the state's future. Over his term as governor, Perry and those he supports have drawn national headlines for all the wrong reasons. In April 2009, he left open the possibility that Texas could secede from the Union if measures like President Barack Obama's stimulus continued to be passed. No matter one's position on Washington, Perry's statements about secession place his state in a poor, if not laughable, light.
ARIZONA SPARKED THE current national illegal immigration debate, passing a law that has drawn criticism across the country. President Barack Obama quickly spoke out against it, saying it could "undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans." Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles was quoted by The New York Times comparing the measure to Nazism. What critics fail to realize is that this law is the result of a failure by the federal government, not the state of Arizona. Faced with few other options other than accepting the status quo, the Arizona legislature gave state authorities the right to enforce federal law by checking the immigration status of individuals who are in contact with police for other violations. It doesn't go above or beyond federal law, as has at times been painted, to discourage illegal immigration.