Every head coach arrives at a new gig with the goal of raising the ceiling. Rice head coach Mike Bloomgren arrived on South Main ahead of the 2018 season and realized the roof was the least of his concerns – his Owls needed to raise the floor. The program won one game in 2017, the last season of David Bailiff’s tenure. Bloomgren remembers having 47 scholarship players available in his first spring practice as Rice’s head coach. This past spring, 107 Owls participated in drills.
“We all want to recruit the stars and the can’t-miss prospects, but we had players on this team that had never even played high school football and that can’t work at the FBS level,” Bloomgren said. “We needed talented depth. We needed a walk-on program like the one we had at Stanford. I knew the bottom half of the roster needed to be overhauled for us to have a chance.”