And The Party Never Ends

Next stop on our tour de CUSA, going all the way across town from Houston to the Rice University Owls. The Owls are going to be looking for greener pastures this year after sending their former coach up the river and picking up Ben Braun. Braun who has a track record for turning teams around had a less than stellar season at Cal last year and they thanked him by terminating his contract. However, the Golden Bears loss is the Owls gain. Braun can bring in the type of player Rice desperately needs on his name alone, and that’s good for him because Rice doesn’t offer a whole lot to work with.

Rice put up numbers that would make any head coach consider putting his resume together and looking for a new job, finishing up 3-27 over all and going spotless in the win column in conference play at 0-16. Having only defeated Eastern Illinois, Texas State and TCU in the regular season one would assume Rice has no where to go but up from here. If you’re an Owls fan, you would hope that as well but it may not be so.

Granted Coach Braun is a bit of a miracle worker in the world of basketball, but the key pieces aren’t there this year and the rest of the conference has been continuing to build up and get better. Braun came a little later than everyone would have liked so he didn’t have time to put together a good recruiting class, though he has started to do that already for next season. However, bad news for the Owls, they can’t sit this year out and wait for greener pastures to appear. There is an upside here, the Owls are a very young team, and I mean very young, only five players are  upperclassmen. With any lucky Braun can put in a system that will benefit these players, or maybe some of these players will fit systems he has used in the past.

Of course the downside of having a couple more years with players is you don’t have a lot of leadership on the court at first so there may be quite a few mistakes by this team throughout the year. There is one other thing worth noting, Rice is a private school, and private universities tend to have the added benefit of having some money to throw around. So if the attitudes of the school administration are in the right place a team on the rise could also benefit from new training facilities in the near future, which tends to also be a fairly big recruiting draw.

Rice Owls Men’s Basketball Schedule 2008-2009

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Date	Opponent / Event	Location	Time / Result
11/15/08	vs. Portland State	Tudor Fieldhouse	3:00 p.m. CT
Basketball Travelers Invitational
11/20/08	vs. Cal Poly	Provo, Utah	6:00 p.m. CT
11/21/08	vs. BYU	Provo, Utah	9:30 p.m. CT
11/22/08	vs. North Florida	Provo, Utah	7:00 p.m. CT
11/25/08	vs. Lamar	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
11/30/08	at Texas	Austin, Texas	2:00 p.m. CT
12/04/08	vs. Texas-San Antonio	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
12/06/08	vs. Texas State	Tudor Fieldhouse	3:00 p.m. CT
12/17/08	vs. Harvard	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:30 p.m. CT
12/20/08	at Duquesne	Pittsburgh, Pa.	1:00 p.m. CT
12/22/08	vs. Oklahoma	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
12/28/08	at Arkansas-Little Rock	Little Rock, Ark.	TBA
12/31/08	vs. Texas A&M	Tudor Fieldhouse	3:00 p.m. CT
01/03/09	at Richmond	Richmond, Va.	11:00 a.m. CT
01/10/09	at Tulane	New Orleans, La.	2:00 p.m. CT
01/14/09	vs. SMU ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
01/17/09	vs. UCF ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	3:00 p.m. CT
01/21/09	at Memphis ^	Memphis, Tenn.	8:00 p.m. CT
01/24/09	at UAB ^	Birmingham, Ala.	2:00 p.m. CT
01/28/09	vs. Tulane ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
01/31/09	vs. East Carolina ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	1:00 p.m. CT
02/07/09	at Houston ^	Houston, Texas	8:00 p.m. CT
02/11/09	vs. Southern Miss ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
02/14/09	at East Carolina ^	Greenville, N.C.	6:00 p.m. CT
02/18/09	vs. UTEP ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	7:00 p.m. CT
02/21/09	at SMU ^	Dallas, Texas	7:00 p.m. CT
02/25/09	at UCF ^	Orlando, Fla.	6:00 p.m. CT
02/28/09	vs. Houston ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	3:00 p.m. CT
03/04/09	at Marshall ^	Huntington, W.Va.	6:00 p.m. CT
03/07/09	vs. Tulsa ^	Tudor Fieldhouse	3:00 p.m. CT

Rice looks to keep to a fairly challenging non-conference slate, perhaps under the mind set of that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Maybe one day but for the most part I see Rice struggling once again this year, maybe a few improvements in the year but I would not be expecting many miracles here. The Owls finish up the year 5-26 and 1-15 in Conference USA, even the losers get lucky sometimes.