| Art Briles comes back to Houston with a good QB |
The Rice Owls and Baylor Bears used to play each other every season. Then the Southwest Conference imploded. The Bears used some political clout to get into the Big 12, a conference where they’ve been outclassed every season. The Owls have bounced around a bit, playing first in the WAC and now in Conference USA. And the Owls, much like Baylor, have been outclassed and out-manned despite their conference affiliation.
The Owls have suffered a bit of a rebirth in this last half of the decade. They’ve made two bowl games, winning once, and though they still tend to lose more games than they win, they’re no longer the pushover they were for many, many years.
The Baylor Bears hired Houston Cougar head coach Art Briles after the 2007 season, and while the Bears have yet to have a wining season under Briles, they’ve become slightly more competitive, especially when dynamic quarterback Robert Griffin III is healthy. And unfortunately for the Owls, Griffin is healthy heading into this weekend’s match-up of former Southwest Conference foes.
“Art’s done a great job,” Rice head coach David Bailiff said on Monday.
“Baylor has a lot better team speed than they’ve had in the past. Griffin, at quarterback, he’s somebody you’ll see play on Monday Night
Football. e’s a great player. They’re offensive line is massive.
Art’s doing what he did at Houston. He’s building a great program.
He’s doing it around team speed. Defensively they base out of the 4-3. They’re blitzing a little bit more than we’ve seen out of our first
three opponents. But he’s recruiting nice, and he’s building a nice
program.”
The key for the Owls is to hope that the Bears (2-1)
aren’t that nice program yet — and last week’s defeat against TCU shows
that they’re a long way from being competitive against good teams —
while fixing the things that have been going wrong for the 1-2 Owls this
season.
“We’re a pretty good football team, but we don’t have a
large margin for error,” Bailiff said. “We can’t overcome the errors
that we make….we have to eliminate those.”
The Owls this season
have, for the most part, been competitive against bigger, stronger
competition. But while they’re improving as a team, they’re not a team
that is so talented that they can make stupid mistake after stupid
mistake and still hope to win a football game. And making stupid
mistake after stupid mistake is something the Owls have been doing a bit
too much this season. Like holding calls negating long runs. Or false
starts. Or interceptions ruining long possessions. Or the continued
inability to effectively run the offense from the red zone, thus costing
the team points.
“There’s no doubt….we’re not getting a lot of
them,” Bailiff said of the mistakes. “But we’re getting them at the
wrong time, when we’re in critical situations. We have to eliminate
those mistakes. We can’t continue to have self-inflicted loss of downs
when it’s something we can control.”
The Owls defense has shown
the most promise so far. Despite having to spend lots of time on the
field, they’ve been able to keep the team in most games. One quarter
doomed them to losses against Texas and Northwestern, and those bad
quarters wouldn’t have been so dooming if the offense had been able to
get everything together at the right time.
“Offensively, we’re
doing some nice things,” Bailiff said. “Still, when we get in the red
zone, we’re kicking way too many field goals. We need touchdowns when
we get down there. That’s going to be a point of emphasis. This week
in practice is just getting a lot more red zone work. When it gets
condensed down there, we still have to make plays.”
Bailiff
admits the coaches are still trying to devise ways to get their most
dynamic offensive players involved all of the time, and one thing
they’ve been trying more of is putting running back Sam McGuffie in the
slot while fellow back Tyler Smith stays in the backfield. That way,
the both of them are on the field at the same time, and hopefully, from
this, the Owls can generate more yards and more points.
But the
focus of this game is once again going to fall on the Rice defense
which is going to be called on to shut down Griffin, one of the more
dynamic offensive players in the country. Griffin has thrown for 703
yards this season, but he’s also averaging 4.3 yards whenever he rushes
with the football while he has become the first-ever Baylor QB to rush
for more than 1,000 yards in his career.
If the Owls can find a
way to keep Griffin shut down while keeping the errors to a minimum,
then they might be able to win this game and go 2-2 on the season. But
if they fail at one or both, then they’re probably looking at another
loss and another weekend of what-ifs and what-shoud-have-beens.
SOME MISCELLANEOUS GAME NOTES: The
Bears have won the last four contests between the two schools,
including a 42-17 pounding of Rice in 2007. But the Bears are only 2-11
on the road under Art Briles, including 1-2 in non-conference
games….The Owls are playing their fourth of seven straight games in
the state of Texas. They don’t venture outside of the state until
October 23 when they head to Orlando for a game with UCF….This weekend
marks the 60th anniversary of Rice Stadium….The game kicks off at
7 p.m. and will be televised on CBS College Sports.
This article appears in Sep 23-29, 2010.
