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A light dose of tradition, with a little nostalgia thrown in, seems to fit the Rice mold reasonably well

HOUSTON (Aug. 24) -- We folks over at Ricefootball.net have been in business since August, 1998. By our unofficial count, that's a longer tenure than anyone in NCAA Division 1A football except for the Stanford Bootleg -- but they went cookie-cutter in 2004 by joining up with the Scout network. So publicly we lay claim (perhaps incorrectly, but no-one's challenged it) to being the longest-running independent division 1A college football team website.

Our aim today is the same as it was when we started: to do what we can to fill the gap with various kinds of coverage that local media, for one reason or another, do not appear to be in a position to provide. This isn't a slam on the local media -- it's just that it isn't 1957 anymore and the Southwest Conference is long gone.

The Sunday night 30 minute coaches show with 16 millimeter films of game highlights from the day before is a thing of the distant past. Our intrepid Chronicle beat reporter, M. K. Bower -- whom we appreciate as much as any other die-hard Rice fans -- has got 18 Rice sports teams to cover, and his allowable news hole has to share space with everything else that's going on, sportwise, in this city of five million people.

MK's interactive blog is a daily delight to read and perhaps the best single innovation for coverage of Rice football in many a year. But note at the same time that that's basically where Chonicle coverage of Rice football has been relegated.

How many Rice football feature stories have appeared in black ink since the August 1 training camp report? Well, excluding, the obligatory Chronicle Media Tour piece, which appeared on a Monday, August 4 (a sports day traditionally reserved for the Prairie Views and the Stephen F. Austins), exactly one -- and it wasn't about anything going on, on the field.

The title: "Rice has game plan for bringing in more fans."

Ouch.

So with actual newspaper column inches talking about Rice football during August two-a-days hovering around virtually the single digits, there's a serious deficit out there, folks. And anything we can do (a) to provide "hard" news coverage (sure it's a little biased) of Rice football, and (b) to collect and point to other sources of coverage -- that's what we strongly feel needs to be done.

Why stay independent, and why not cover recruiting?

We're occasionally asked a couple of questions that bear a response. First, why don't you guys go "legitimate" and align yourselves with one of the two major site sponsors? (Rivals is open.) And the second question is very much bound up with the first: Why don't y'all make the effort to do a little recruiting news?

In fact, we've never covered the recruiting scene per se. Occasionally we'd publish feature stories in December and January highlighting the career of a particularly successful Owl player, both on and off the field, sometimes with comments from mom and dad about what a great experience it was. Hint, hint.

But in 11 years we've never spoken once to a Rice recruit or signee before he actually matriculated and starting attending the school. For one thing (and here your writer concurs with M.K.), the attention lavished on high school football stars appears to be overblown and misguided, to say the least. But still, we know that a lot of college football fans just love to follow the recruiting game. The thing is, if we did so --   if we ever even got on the phone with a prospective Rice "studenathalete" -- we'd be dead meat with the NCAA.

The reason is the the NCAA, in its published regulations, forbids such contact by what it terms "Boosters." And it defines the term "Booster" so broadly that it includes not only alumni and donors but team fans generally. Strictly speaking, what fan website editor or contributor is not that?

Well, WE certainly are unabashed Rice "Boosters." We "Boost" 'em every chance we get. Both our editor and our columnist are former Owl Club Board members and have been season ticket holders in multiple sports for decades. The financial contributions of our web page contributors, while certainly not so large as to be ensconced in the "Big Shot" category, are made every year, in amounts not completely insignificant. In short, if there ever were a booster of any college football team, our entire (five-person) staff would be included in that flock.

The chain sites provide recruiting information, interviews, contacts, etc., etc. as part of their contract with individual site editors. There's no way we could touch a contract like that with a ten-foot pole.  Besides, we started to try it, once.

Back in 1999, Neal Farmer was the Rice beat writer for the Chronicle, and he came to us with a proposal: let's do a Rivals site together, and we'd do the football and he'd do everything else.

The more we checked into it, the less consistent it appeared to be with our aims. Design and layout were strictly controlled. Message boards were obligatory and frankly we'd just as soon be dissociated from message boards, not because they're a bad thing at all, but rather because of the relative distaste typically exhibited them by coaches and administrators (although some out there still remain convinced that we have some kind of input or control as to their management and content).

So we resolutely stayed independent -- as we remain to this day.

So do we have any readers/viewers? Mainly, we appear to have a hard core of loyal and devoted Rice fans who visit the site regularly. That's who we cater to. That's who we adjust our line towards. Long time Rice fans. Current students who follow the team closely. Former players. And most of all, the player parents and families -- those mamas are by far our most loyal readers.

Rice has a graduate populations that's widely spread out over the entire country, and it's getting moreso all the time.  We try to provide a reliable source of "one-stop shopping" to those Rice fans who are ensonced in the hinterlands.

Our readers gave us just over 2,725,000 total page views during calendar year 2007 -- and '06 was a bigger year than that.

In our next installment, we'll have a run-down of specific viewing statistics, complete with charts. But today, we stick with hot air.

Editorial policies that try to fit Rice's situation

In so doing, we next turn to a brief list of editorial policies that we've been following for the past 11 years. Such as...

--No "Grades." Who the hell are we, anyway, and what do we know? There are several hundred former Owl football players out there, more than a few of whom regularly visit our site, and each of them knows a heck of a lot more about what's going on, on the field, than we do. We eschew "grading" of both individual and team performances, and try and keep blatant opinionizing to a reasonable level, preferably vested in a bit of tongue-in-cheek.

--No direct criticism of individual players. If one offensive lineman's work looked to be particularly offensive last Saturday, maybe talk about offensive line play generally. But not individuals. His mama already knows, anyway.

--Take (and publish) action shots of as many Rice players as possible. If a mom or dad emails asking for an action shot of his or her boy, do your best to get the best shot you can, and post it. If they don't play,  then get a good candid shot of them sitting on the bench and post it. (But don't send it to them; they're free to download it off the web just like any other reader; never provide anything of value to any player or player until after eligibility is exhausted.)

--Before any game, consider this story angle: How would the Houston daily papers have covered this game in 1957, with 60,000 people in the stands? This game may not be much of a big deal to the mass of 21st-Century Houstonians, but it is a big deal to us -- and to our readers.

--Who are the team leaders (not necessarily the biggest on-field stars)? Identify them, ask the sports information staff to produce them, and give them a podium to express themselves in an articulate way.

--Harken back to and promote the old traditions as a means of continuity. (Granted, most younger Rice fans might not even be aware of some of the old traditions, or that we even  had any traditions, particularly, at all. But be a source of information in that regard.) Thus, for example, our occasional reference to "the Institute" and the adaptation of the John Churchill Chase 50's program cartoons.

--Don't be afraid to stir the pot a little, as regards this week's opponent, but keep it clean. (In '98, starting off, we learned a quick lesson: we had a long, panoramic shot of the MOB performing before the Texas game in Rice Stadium and one kid, about 8 pixels tall, in the background of the photo, had on a "Tuck Fexas" teeshirt. Sure enough, some Little Old Lady wrote then-AD Bobby May a letter saying shame on you for promoting such things and she's never going to give Rice another nickel again. It can get that silly, if we're not careful.  At the same time, come Tulsa Week this season, it's going to be perfectly OK to mention that those folks just spent millions remodeling a stadium, when, at completion, will hold 14,000 fewer fans than the old one we TORE DOWN in 1950.)

--Toe the thin line between unabashed support and tongue-in-cheek. A true Rice fan has to have a bit of a sense of the absurd, or at least a heavy helping of irony, to make it through the season. We're no different.

--PTH

Does anybody ever read this thing?
Reader interest appears to mirror
success of team – or lack thereof
AT&T indicates average of just under 3 million home page hits a year

HOUSTON (Aug. 25) -- In its eleven-odd years of existence, this publication has never announced readership figures of any kind. To begin with, the thought was that the highest possible circulation number was not an appropriate goal; rather, the idea was to provide a resource for the Rice football-adhering community, be it large or be it minuscule, to resort to in good times or bad, thick media coverage or thin.

And admittedly, there have been more of the latter than the former over the past decade. Too, with the relatively demure size of Rice’s cozy cadre of hardcore football fans, we never expected to break any kind of records for total readership.

Still, the questions occasionally come: Do you people have ANY readers at all? Wouldn’t you have more if you went "legitimate"?

Starting at the beginning of the’06 season, we endeavored to keep more than casual track of our readership, and so signed up for site-statistic provisions optionally afforded us by our web host.

Our service provider is AT&T/Yahoo, and we employ the counting devices that they make available to their customers. All the numbers given below were taken directly from the AT&T website management center – so if they’re inaccurate, then a lot of other website customers are getting bad information, too. With AT&T, we have to assume a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Problem is, our web service provider tends to change the counting conventions in the middle of the game. We were switched from "total page views" to "discrete viewing sessions" on and off a couple of times in the past two years. So we have to do some interpolating.

Let’s take calendar year 2007, for example. From January through August was counted "total page views" – hits, in other words – for the home page index.html that total 1,817,678. It’s instructive to note, then, that we received nearly two million page views during the eight months out of the year when football is NOT in season. Bear in mind also that this counts only home page views, not views of other, "jump" pages. In a single session, of course, the reader can go back and forth from home page to jump page several times – thus, the number for total home page views would be expected to exceed by at least some degree that number of individual visitors to the site, per day.

As it turned out, the AT&T folks decided to count for us the total "discrete viewing sessions" for September through December of that year. The number of separate viewing sessions (index.html only) for that four-month period (the first three months of which coincided, obviously, with football season) totaled 108,765.

Even academ math will indicate that, assuming a constant daily/weekly/monthly rate of viewing (which of course is a not necessarily reliable assumption), that yields up and average of 8.35 home page views per session. Given such assumption, we come up with calendar year total home page views of 2,726, 517. (Actually we think that’s a conservative estimate because the 8.35 ratio for home page views per session seems a bit high. Research into other website traffic indicates that the typical ratio is around four to five views per session.)

Again, we have hard evidence of 1.8 million home page views from January through August, 2007, and we have hard evidence of 108,765 discreet visits from September through December, 2007.

One thing’s for sure, readership definitely decreased during the 2007 season given similar dates in 2006. As one might expect, the relative success of the team on the field appeared to have quite a significant effect.

The number of "discrete visits" during September through December, 2006 – the Todd Graham era – totaled 347,209, or an average of 2,849 per day.

Does that mean the Ricefootball.net had only 40 per cent of the readership during the 2007 season than it did during the 2006 season We think not; rather, a reasonable assumption would be that, with increased success on the field, and the drive toward a possible conference championship and bowl game, the number of repeat visitors to the site multiplied. So instead of checking once or twice a week, as they likely did late in the 2007 season, or readers tended to visit the site every day, perhaps more than once a day, when the Owls knocking off East Carolina and SMU in ‘06 and headed to a bowl game.

Also, bear in mind that the season was completely over as of November 24, 2007, whereas it extended a full month longer, with the play up to the New Orleans Bowl, in December, 2006.

So it’s clear that viewership is decidedly elastic, and as the Owls do better, the number of site visitors increases materially, though not exponentially.

But when we get the greatest amount of traffic, clearly, is when a coach is fired, quits, or is hired.

It turns out that the month in 2007 with the greatest number of total page views was January, in which 308,333 hits were logged. That would appear to be surprising for an off-season month, until one factors in the surprise resignation of Todd Graham and the ongoing coaching search that took place during that month. On January 19, reporting the David Bailiff hiring press conference, we rang up 35, 177 home page views – the largest ever, for a single day.

Next highest was the hiring of Todd Graham, which generated just over 27,000 home page hits on the day of the press conference.

Here are some specific results, set out by table:

--PTH

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