Several weeks ago I offered my potential road trips for the 2010 season.  It looks like its down to Minnesota on 10/2 or the November road game at Penn State.  I’ll be in the state of Texas on Saturday but painfully not at the Rice game.  For those of you that are making the trek, I’d love photos and impressions of the stadium/experience and of course, purple presence.  Who is going to add to the flag total?!!! Let’s get in to it – but first, be sure to read this confidence-boosting bit on Dan Persa from our man Teddy Greenstein. OK, now let’s get in to it…

Rice Stadium has a capacity (47,000) just 130 shy of NU (47,130) although, as we’ll explain it technically has a much bigger potential capacity.  The Owls still cite 1949 as THE year in their team history which is rather ironic as it is one of TWO (or three) years we tend to cite (along with 1995 and even 1996).  It’s the last bowl win we have to our name and it was as you know the grandaddy of ‘em all over Cal. 

We’ve been looking for models of stadium renovations for potential future Ryan Field blueprints and the potential impact for recruiting, attendance and the like.  If you’re looking for a case study in a renovation having zero ROI then Rice may well be the case (although Stanford would make a good one as well).  Rice Stadium was renovated in 2006.   It’s not to be confused with Utah’s home venue – Rice-Eccles Stadium – which also had a major makeover ($50M)  recently.   In fairness, the 2006 renovation was very minor as the bulk of it included the installation of a big scoreboard, a new field and touch-ups to the facilities that are all housed within the football-only venue.  The stadium still has a 70,000 potential capacity, but the endzones have been tarped with Rice Owl logos to try and provide a more intimate setting (read: hide the atrocious amount of empty seats). This is a plan, many NU fans have called for in non-conference games. They touted the heck out of the renovations, but one could argue – especially when you consider their 10-win 2008 season – it has done nothing to stop an embarassing attendance slide :

RICE SEASON HOME ATTENDANCE AVERAGE:

2004 Season (3-8 – WAC) -15,785 – 106th in NCAA

2005 Season (1-10 – C-USA) – 10,072 (Final year before renovation)

2006 Season -(7-6, 6-2) – 14,760 – 112th in NCAA

2007 Season (3-9, 3-5) – 13,353

2008 (10-3, 7-1) – 20,179 – 94th in NCAA

2009 (2-10, 1-7): 13,552 – 115th in NCAA (out of 120!)

Ugh. Technically, Rice should’ve been booted after the ’06 season since the NCAA put a rule in that in order to maintain DI status you had to either average over 15,000 fans or have at least one season of more than 15,000 in a 2-year rolling period.  Amazingly, this came on the heels of Rice nearly booting themselves out of DI. About seven years ago Rice commissioned McKinsey to do a feasability study based on Rice staying or going in DI as the athletic department was hemmorhaging money to the tune of about $10 million per year.  The anti-athletics Rice professors had the board of trustees resolving to ditch DI football which bonded the Rice alums and a vocal group to save the sport.  It was such a powerful grassroots effort that the Owls administration did a 180 and committed to upgrading facilities and the football stadium was part of that mix. 

Rice Stadium has some incredible history, albeit not much in the way of college football in my lifetime.  It’s the partial answer to a fantastic trivia question – which three venues are the only stadiums to host a Super Bowl without having an NFL team as a tennant? The answer is the Rose Bowl, Stanford Stadium and Rice Stadium which hosted the 1974 Super Bowl – Super Bowl VIII which saw the Dolphins crush Minnesota 24-7.  Rice Stadium was originally built to for a 70,000 seat capacity which served it well during the glory days of the Southwest Conference. At the time, only the Cotton Bowl was bigger in the conference.  Rice’s downward football appeal coincided somewhat with the arrival of an AFL franchise in the early 60s – the Houston Oilers. The Oilers actually played their home games at Rice Stadium from ’65-’67 before moving in to the now time capsule formerly known as the 8th Wonder of the World – the Houston Astrodome.

Speaking of astronauts, Rice Stadium’s most historical claim to fame (sorry Bluebonnet Bowl and Houston Cougars) is JFK’s 1962 speech in which he reiterated his challenge to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade and used Rice playing Texas as a rhetorical question meant to be analagous to mission impossible that could be possible.  From Wikipedia – the excerpt referencing Rice:

“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Today, Rice’s website is bragging about its state-of-the-art turf which is the “exact same” surface as both Ohio State and West Virginia. Amazingly, Rice is in the top 25 in attendance averaging nearly 150% of capacity since the “home” opener against Texas was played at Reliant Stadium in Houston and the 70,000+ goes on the attendance average ensuring that Rice will have its best attendance season in more than a decade even if they draw less than 20,000 the rest of the way.  I’m unclear as to why they didn’t actually remove the tarps and play the game at Rice – perhaps it was part of the way to accommodate Texas.  It’s pretty clear that unlike Vanderbilt, this game against a fellow top 20 academic power won’t quite have the home field advantage.  While we’re at it have you cashed in your free tickets for next Saturday yet? Do it!