PonyFans.com

Rice leading UH 21-14 and driving two minutes until halftime

Rice 28-14 at Halftime. Wow!

They never are for us

Rice scores 30 straight points after UH opens with a 14-0 lead but UH comes back from 16 point deficit to win 31-30(Rice missed an extra point and it never was 28-14 as stated above)

Todd Graham is my hero

I watched the last 8 minutes or so of this game. Neither team looked very impressive. I am curious as to how Rice scored 27 in one quarter. I may have to watch a replay of the game to see. I was strange however seeing Rice operate from the spread offense. It looks like they will have some growing pains as we are having. I just hope they have them throughout the whole year and do not mature before we play them.

I was at this game last night. I can tell you right now that I am officially impressed by Grahm for a couple of reasons. They have great field discipline (not sure if they were flagged even 1 time in the game), where as the Coogs had one bone head penalty after another. I was also impressed by how good they looked on offense being that you would expect a transition year for them. Rice will not be good this season, but they will be no pushover in CUSA.

UH. Where do I begin? I have been a big Art Briles fan all along but was not impressed with him in this game. He flat out has better players than Rice does. I am not sure why he did not have a more direct approach to the game. He called way to many of his "I drew this one up in the dirt just now" plays for my taste in the 2nd quarter when UH went flat. UH started to get rolling again when they started to go back to things that worked and not be so cute. On the defensive side of the ball UH is somewhat weak. They get no pressure on the QB at all- which is their one glaring weakness. While I feel like they have some athletic guys playing in the secondary, their effectiveness was limited by the pathetic pass rush the front 4 provided. I still see them being an 8 win team, with losses at Miami, at Southern Miss, at home vs either UCF or Tulsa, and at SMU .

For those who were chalking up UAB as a W, I think that will now be a pretty difficult game. Sure OU was breaking in a new QB, but damn UAB looked pretty good.

I am sticking with my prediction of 5 wins. If we lose in the next three weeks, the figure will go down quickly.

How did your Rice team finish Stallion?

McClown27 wrote:For those who were chalking up UAB as a W, I think that will now be a pretty difficult game. Sure OU was breaking in a new QB, but damn UAB looked pretty good.

I am sticking with my prediction of 5 wins. If we lose in the next three weeks, the figure will go down quickly.

UAB broke out a triple option that OU had obviously not prepared for. Rice was hard enough to prepare against when you could prepare for a week, imagine facing it with no prior knowledge. Once OU adapted to it, tehy were able to slow the UAB attack. Also, OU made a lot of stupid mistakes, penalties and turnovers that kept UAB in the game.

UAB does not have tremendous atheletes, but I was impressed with the effort on both sides of the line. OU was unable to get a strong push against them on defense, but it helped that UAB had 7 or 8 in the box at all times. Oline did decent, but were helped by the unknown scheme. UAB secondary looked like a weakness, the OU QB missed some pretty open receivers.

UAB was unable to establish a consistant passing attack, the passes they hit were because OU was pulled up to stop the run. With the strength of our team the front 7, I think we match up well, but we have to be able to throw the ball, just like against UNT next week.

I wouldn't be quick to judge the strength of a team based on the first game of the season. Yes, UAB played OU close, but that doesn't mean that they are now the front runners for CUSA West title.

Remember back to the 1995 season, where we beat Arkansas the first game of the year, and then went on to lose the next 10.

How many people think Rice's offensive output was partially based on Houston not knowing what to expect/prepare for? That is a good explanation for all the points they scored before halftime.

PonySoprano wrote:I wouldn't be quick to judge the strength of a team based on the first game of the season. Yes, UAB played OU close, but that doesn't mean that they are now the front runners for CUSA West title.

Well, I just pointed that out because many folks on this board automatically put W's next to all of our games that were not against Tech, Tulsa, and UTEP. I am just saying that we cannot count on a victory there, as Stallion pointed out against Rice.

One does have to be pleasantly surprised by the strong level of play in the CUSA this year.

McClown27 wrote:For those who were chalking up UAB as a W, I think that will now be a pretty difficult game. Sure OU was breaking in a new QB, but damn UAB looked pretty good.

I am sticking with my prediction of 5 wins. If we lose in the next three weeks, the figure will go down quickly.

Marshall lost 13-10 at Georgia last year.

OU has no QB, no WRs - they could be a bad Top 20 team for a while.

I am impressed with Rice, but not surprised with Houston taking this game lightly - as they did against us last year. They are cocky.