Ferd Lewis: Rice hoping its brains and brawn will matter

The last time we saw the Rice University football team play Hawaii at Aloha Stadium it brought the sleight of hand of the wishbone offense.

This time the Owls (1-1) come packing what they like to call in-your-facemask “intellectual brutality.”

And, no, this is not a math competition to crack the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

When you are attempting to turn around the fortunes of a team that went 1-11 at an academically select institution where the average SAT composite score is 1510 (out of 1600), first-year head coach Mike Bloomgren figures you work to your strengths.

“We’re trying to run a West Coast offense with a lot of volume to it and really give our kids answers going to the line of scrimmage. That’s the first part. It sounds smart, right? Give our kids answers. If we weren’t using their brains we felt like we wouldn’t be using all their talents,” Bloomgren said.

“And, then, the last part is how physical we want to play. Basically, we want to be brutes. We want to impose our will. When the ball is snapped we want to put on film the team that nobody wants to play,” Bloomgren said.

It is a formula Bloomgren embraced at Stanford, where he spent seven years, the last five as the Cardinal’s Andrew Luck-endowed director of offense.

To that bruising style, sometimes employing three tight ends, Bloomgren added his own catch phrase, going so far as to trademark “intellectual brutality” while at Stanford. Now it is something you will see emblazoned on the walls of the Owls’ recent addition, the $31.5 million, 60,000-square-foot end zone Patterson Sports Performance Center at Rice Stadium.

At Rice, which is particularly known for its science and engineering programs, one of Bloomgren’s predecessors called the Owls job, “Probably the biggest challenge in college football …”

With the basic annual cost of attendance listed at $61,350, Bloomgren’s sales pitch goes like this: “There are really only five places in America where you can get a world-class degree and play big-time college football at a high level. That’s Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Stanford and Duke.”

Bloomgren figures, “There is a pool of kids that want to do both at a very high level, those are the ones we target. We may not beat Stanford or Northwestern, but there is a (bunch) of kids that we have a chance at, and most of those are self-starters, really driven kids, and a lot of them have that tough mind-set” he seeks at the newly christened “Home of Intellectual Brutality.”

He said, “I liked the kind of kids we had at Stanford and the chance to work with similar ones, that’s really why I took the job in the first place. I really thought they would embrace (the style of play) and they have been all over it. We’re trying to make it something that we really live and breathe. It has really been good (so far), awesome. Even though we are just in year one, we have some fullbacks we really believe in and some tight ends that are playing really good football already.”

The most physical players on offense and defense from each game are designated as “Brutes of the Week” and given “WWF-type championship belts to wear around,” Bloomgren said. “This is Texas, so nobody gets too alarmed at big belt buckles.”

Returning the Owls to winning ways would be an eye-opener, though.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.