Stand and cheer!
Vict’ry’s near!
You could have knocked me over with a feather when I opened the Washington Post’s sports section yesterday and saw that columnist Chuck Culpepper had named the 2-2 Rice Owls as college football’s team of the year.
From Culpepper’s column:
The gold medal for team of the year goes to Rice, and you may quibble with that [choice], should you have a hankering for being wrong.
Culpeper picked the Owls “not just because Rice just pulled off the upset of the year, one of those occasional football upsets so inconceivable that the score cannot be true” but also because Rice’s 2020 season epitomized college football (and team sports in general) in the year of covid-19.
You see, Rice was originally scheduled to play on September 3 against Houston, on September 12 against Army, on September 19 against LSU, and on September 26 against Lamar. But all of those games had to be cancelled.
After three more football-less Saturdays, the Owls finally took the field for their first game of the 2020 season on October 24. Their opponent? The always tough Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders – who were playing in their seventh game of the season. Middle Tennessee eventually won the game 40-34 in the second overtime.
Rice had a chance to win the game in the first overtime period, but an attempted field goal hit BOTH uprights and the crossbar TWICE before falling short. (If it wasn’t for bad luck, the Rice kicker wouldn’t have no luck at all.)
The Owls travelled to Hattiesburg, Mississippi the next week and dominated Southern Mississippi, 30-6. The team looked to be on a roll, but the next two scheduled contests were cancelled.
Rice then lost to North Texas on November 21 and had their November 28 game cancelled before flying off to West Virginia to face the undefeated and 15th-ranked Marshall Thundering Herd. The Las Vegas oddsmakers gave Rice no chance to win – they made Marshall 24.5-point favorites.
To add insult to injury, Rice’s starting quarterback was unavailable for the game, forcing the Owls to start a backup QB who hadn’t thrown a single pass in the entire 2020 season.
Despite all that, David beat Goliath TWENTY TO NOTHING! (Yes, you read that right – they shut mighty Marshall out!)
“We were exactly who we wanted to be,” the Rice coach said after the game. “It was intellectual brutality all over the field.”
Speaking of “intellectual brutality”:
Click here to read the entire Chuck Culpepper column.
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Do you remember the “world’s shortest book” joke template?
You’d name a fictional title and say it was the world’s shortest book – for example, Italian War Heroes or Good Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
I don’t think that a book titled Great Moments in Rice University Football History would be the shortest book in the world, but it would be pretty short.
Such a book would definitely have a chapter on the infamous play in the 1954 Cotton Bowl when an Alabama player came off the bench to tackle star Rice running back Dicky Moegle, who was on his way to the end zone. Click here to see that play. (The referees awarded a touchdown to Rice, which ended up winning the game easily.)
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| Alabama needed twelve men to stop Dicky Moegle |
I’d also include the team’s improbable win over Texas A&M in 1974 – not so much for the game (although it was a very satisfying victory) but because the Rice Marching Owls Band’s halftime show so incensed the Aggie fans that they rioted after the game. (Band members had to be escorted from the stadium back to their dorms by Houston policemen.) Click here for a video about that game.
Of course, the book would recount Rice’s stunning 19-17 manhandling of the Texas Longhorns in 1994 – a game that was televised to a national audience because the baseball players’ union had gone on strike that year and forced the cancellation of the World Series. Click here to watch the highlights of that game.
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| Rice students celebrating the 1994 win over Texas |
(That 1994 upset represents the only one of 43 Rice-Texas contests since 1966 that was won by the Owls, but it provided a small measure of payback to all those Texas fans who used to chant “What comes out of a Chinaman’s ass? Rice, Rice, RICE!” when the Owls and Longhorns faced off on the gridiron.)
Today, thanks to the 2020 Owls and their the-little-engine-that-could performance against fearsome Marshall, Great Moments in Rice University Football History is one chapter longer. Click here to view the highlights of that monumental upset.
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Click here to hear a stirring marching band arrangement of the “Rice Fight Song.”
If you’d like to sing along, here are the lyrics:
Fight for Rice!
Rice fight on!
Loyal sons arise!
The Blue and Gray!
For Rice today!
Comes breaking through the skies!
Fight, fight, fight!
Stand and cheer!
Vict’ry’s near!
Sammy leads the way!
Onward go!
To crush the foe!
We’ll fight for Blue and Gray!
(Note: “Sammy” is the name of Rice’s mascot, which is an owl. Athena’s bird, you know.)
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