ECU 49, Rice 13
Another one-sided defeat
yields no answers for Rice

Rice QB Nick Fanuzzi picked up his game against East Carolina; it helped that he had the same offensive line in front of him as he had the week before, with OLs coming back off the injured list (PTH photo)

GREENVILLE, N.C. (Oct. 18) – A minute into the fourth quarter of Saturday’s Rice- East Carolina game, the Owls were trailing, but by a surmountable 28-13 score. They had the ball, and were driving at midfield.

At the point, the game easily could have been quite a bit tighter.

Second quarter, after the Owls had drawn within 21-10 via an 80-yard pass-and-run from Nick Fanuzzi to Toren Dixon, the Flock gave the points right back with a breaddown in coverage on the kickoff return.

Before that, down 7-3, the Owls’ Ronnie Lillard stepped in front of a Patrick Pinckney pass to intercept on second and goal from the Rice 12. Seeing all that bright green real estate in front of him, the redshirt freshman’s eyes grew large, and he took off in a spring for the opposite goal line, some 90 yards away. But at that moment, the dreaded failure of "ball security" reared its ugly head, as ECU’s Alex Taylor caught up with him and managed to strip the ball away. Moments later, ECU scored to go ahead 14-3.

Next time Rice got the ball, the Owls drove as far as their 48 yard line before stalling. Kyle Martens’ pooch punt was perfectly executed, however, and ECU’s Travis Simmons promptly mishandled it at his own 19 yard line. Four pairs of Rice hands were in position to make the recovery, deep in Pirate territory, but the ball bounced crazily and it wound up in the breadbasket of ECU’s Duane Blacknall.

So figure the breaks. Early in the fourth quarter, Rice easily could have been in a dead heat with ECU rather than struggling mightily and on the verge of getting right back in it.

But a split second later, all of that didn’t matter. ECU’s Dustin Lineback stepped in front of a quick out that Owl quarterback Nick Fanuzzi wished then as he wishes now never to have thrown.

The East Carolina corner raced 36 yards yards downfield before he was dragged down by offensive lineman Scott Mitchell. From the Rice 20, ECU scored in four plays, and it was 35-13, ECU.

"East Carolina played a good football game," Rice head coach David Bailiff said afterwards. "But at the start of the fourth quarter, it’s a two possession game. We’re in it to win it at that point. We throw an interception, and the guy runs it back to the 20 – and the absolute wheels come off."

"Then we start pressing."

But the unavoidable question is: even if all the breaks had broken right for the Owls, even if the fumbles would have been recovered and the drives would have been completed and the interceptions would have never happened, would the Institute Boys been able to overcome the huge cloud that now appears to be hanging over their heads, ready to pour down acid rain as soon as the worm turns against them?

"We’ve got to grow up; we’ve got to make plays, and we leave too many opportunities out on the football field," was Coach Bailiff’s response. "We still don’t take care of the little things, and that’s the thing that aggravates me the most. We don’t finish the play. Very frustrating – but somehow we’ve got five games left. Once again it wasn’t lack of effort. It’s just that when bad things happen, we start to press; we start to play out of the scheme."

"It’s a cycle we’ve identified; we’ve just got to keep working on it. Because this game should not have ended it up the way it did."

First half, OK; third quarter, good; fourth, tilt

The team did show a decent amount of resilience in the first half against East Carolina, and, no matter how you slice it, played one heck of a third quarter on both sides of the ball.

Which is not to say that the Owls didn’t start off the game in their usual, somnolent manner. Rice won the toss and deferred (since taking the ball the last couple times out hasn’t seemed to work too well).

ECU promptly drove the ball 67 yards in six plays for the score, the last 16 coming on a screen pass from Patrick Pinckney to Dwayne Harris. Worked like a charm. As usual.

When it was Rice’s turn, the Owls came out throwing, and on a couple of quickly-developing pass plays, Nick Fanuzzi hit Taylor Wardlow downfield for 13, and then Patrick Randolph way down field for 33 more. Those two plays were actually quite rousing, and put a hush in the partisan crowd.

But then, with first down at the ECU 17, you know what came next – indifferent halfback dive up the middle for three feet, and then two hurried passes in the dirt. Clark Fangmeier did connect on his field goal try from 33 yards out, though, so, how about that, the Owls scored the first time they got their hands on the ball.

But still the Rice defense couldn’t get untracked, as the Pirates took the ensuing kickoff and dinked their way downfield. A 19-yard Pinckney-to-Harris pass set up the Pirates with another first down – ARRRRGGH! – at the Rice two yard line. But Scott Solomon and Andrew Sendejo teamed up on successive plans to shut down rushing attempts for scant yardage, and nestled in between was a holding call that set ECU back to the Rice 13.

That’s when Turning Point Number One happened, as Lillard made his pick, headed upfield, but got the ball stripped away. Now operating at the Rice 33, it took ECU five plays to reach the end zone, and thus take a 14-3 lead with two minutes to go in the first quarter.

(Ed. note:  Review of the videos at Monday night's EPC dinner confirmed that Ronnie was downed when seperated from the ball -- should've belonged to Rice.  The Rice coaches challenged the call at the time, but all that it earned them was a penalty timeout.)

After the Owls took the return kickoff and moved the ball as far as midfield came Turning Point Number Two when the muffed Kyle Martens punt failed to yield up a turnover for the Owls, deep in ECU territory.

Instead, the two teams played the field position game, and the Owls lost out badly in the bargain, moments later having to punt out from their own two yard line. Under a heavy rush, Kyle Martens’ punt was partially blocked and sailed out of bounds at the Rice 34.

With the short field, ECU went the requisite yardge in seven plays to take a 21-3 lead. The Owls had appeared to have the upper hand on this possession when the Pirates faced a third and 19 from the Rice 23, thanks to a holding call and a TFL of ECU’s Brandon Jackson by Cheta Ozougwu.

But Pinckney put the ball up for grabs on third and long, and ECU’s Reyn Willis won the jump-ball battle with Andrew Sendejo and Chris Jones at the Rice 3. Scott Solomon stopped Brandon’s first rushing attempt cold, but the ECU running back scored on the next play, and with eight minutes to go in the half, it was 21-3, East Carolina.

At that point, the Owl defense stiffened and stopped the Pirate attack cold on their next two possessions. Unfortunately, ECU returned the favor as Rice three-and-outed both times on the return possession.

It was then that lightning struck, as Nick Fanuzzi connected with Toren Dixon on a sideline route which turned into an 80-yard pass-and-run scoring play, easily the Owls’ longest bomb of the season. It happened on the very first play from scrimmage on the Owls’ next possession. The ECU corner had been cheating up, and on this play, he took the slotback, Pierre Beasley, so TD had an open catch followed by a footrace down the sideline, which, by golly, he won.

"It was a great play," QB Nick Fanuzzi said afterwards – speaking of the play call, not his own role. "We knew that their corner was going to bite off of it. It was a play we’ve worked at thorughtout the week. Right off the bat you have a good feel for it. TD made a good move on the corner, we got him to bite off a little hand fake. It came at a big time in the game. We started building off of that."

Well, the Owls started building offensively, at least.

To say the Rice bench was charged by the 80-yard scoring play would be an understatement, but a bad case of "here we go again" occurred on the ensuing kickoff to scotch their enthusiasm in a hurry.

t seemed that Brandon Yelovich’s kickoffs weren’t getting quite the float time or the distance he’d been previously demonstrating – perhaps it was the cold, damp air. This one carried to the ECU 8 where it was gathered in by the Pirates’ ace return man, Harris. He cut toward the middle of the field but after about ten yards suddenly darted toward the home sideline and found himself with big running room.

This time, not even the Rice kicker had a decent chance at him, and the ECU return man raced 92 yards basically untouched, and the excitement created by Toren Dixon’s reception was suddenly swept into the background.

So instead of a halftime score of 21-10, it was 28-10; instead of a close game, it was deja vu all over again.

Third quarter was well played, but bought only 3 points

Then came the Owls’ big defensive third quarter, interspersed by some, but not enough, Rice offense.

Kevin Gaddis, subbing for the injured Shane Turner, got the Owls off to a quick start with a 33-yard return to the Rice 42 yard line. The Owls started with a quick out for five to Dixon, but were flagged for holding, and couldn’t make up the penalty yardage, having to punt it away from midfield.

Kyle Martens got off a perfect punt which was downed at the ECU 2 by a gaggle of Owls, and this time, field position was working in Rice’s favor.

But ECU got out its dink machine, using its size on the offensive line to forge ahead, a few yards at a time, until Phillip Gaines batted away a Pinckney pass on third and short from the Rice 39.

Poor Phillip was playing with a mummified cast that looked to go from his armpit to his fingertips, protecting his fractured wrist, and the bound-up wing was as about as useful as a baseball bat, but Phillip used it as just that to strike down the pass – with a healthy wing, it could have been a pick-six the other way. Credit Phillip for the Old College Try on that one, though.

The Owls started their next possession at the Rice 18, and steadily drove the ball downfield, reaching the ECU 7 before running out of gas. It was an impressive drive, nonetheless, and Clark Fangmeier made it a two-possession game with a chip-shot field goal as the clock showed 4:11 remaining in the third quarter.

The Rice defensive front came to the fore on ECU’s next possession, as Aaron Williams, Michael Smith, Alex Lowry and Cheta Ozougwu all teamed up to hold the Bucs to a three-and-out.

Cheta said he’d hoped that finally he and his fellow DLs might be finding the zone they’ve been looking for all season.

"I really don’t know what to say, it just comes down to the guys making the plays," he noted. "We had guys in position to make the plays many times, bu tit was bad tackling, that’s been our nemesis. I think tackling is all in the head. It’s just saying, "hey, I’m not going to let this guy get by me."

Nick:  never should've tossed that one

When Nick Fanuzzi came out confidently moving his team downfield on the next possession, it looked as if we had ourselves a ball game. The Owls had to start at their own 10 after a holding infraction on the punt set them back, but mixing the short pass and the run, Fanooz had the Flock percolating at midfield when Turning Point Number Three rose up.

Nick was trying to hit Toren Dixon in the flat but the ball was a bit underthrown and, as Nick would later insist, just an ill-advised ball.

"It’s a two touchdown game and I made a bad decision," Nick lamented afterwards. "A pick that he could have taken back to the house, and they score on it. I saw the backer go out, the corner was playing deep, so it was a drop off route off the fly. I was trying to go over him, but I didn’t get it high enough; it wasn’t even near high enough, it was right at his head level. He made a good play, but it wasn’t a good throw, it wasn’t a good decision."

When ECU’s Dustin Lineback (without the "er" at the end) got the oskie returned as far as the Rice 20, though, the Owls tightened up noticeably.

ECU scored in four plays to make it 35-13, and then head coach Skip Holtz decided to run up a couple more Tds to please the Homecoming crowd – it was first time his club had eclipsed the 30 point mark on the season, and he was under fire by scribes and fans for the pecadillo of running an "unimaginative" offensive game plan. And what the heck, Rice won’t come back and bite him when he travels to Rice Stadium in 2010. Just like they didn’t when he went there in 2006.

--P.T.H.

Owls seek U-turn
on road with ECU

Rice QB Nick Fanuzzi gave props to his makeshift, inexper- ienced offensive linemen as having made big strides in the past couple of week; here, big Davon Allen holds the line for Nick (PTH photo)

HOUSTON (Oct. 15) – Now,  deny -- or not -- that in the deepest recesses of your thoughts, you never even contemplated the possibility that we’d be where we are at the mid-point of this damnable 2009 Rice football season.

Owlook

The season- opener, a league game on the road against a team with a hot-shot senior quarterback, was a dice throw no matter how it was sliced. And the next five games – six, actually, counting the one coming up with East Carolina -- could easily have gone down as uphill battles even under the most favorable of circumstances, with a healthy Rice team and a jaunty steed of a quarterback.

But when the ill-advised quarterback shuffle failed to produce anything but September confusion, and when QB Nick Fanuzzi, and then one offensive linemen after another, following by a profusion of key players on both sides of the ball, all went down with injuries, well, it was Katy bar the door.

A deeper cause for concern at this stage in the season lies not merely in the fact that the Owls are 0-6 and the butt of sportswriters’ jokes, but rather, in the fact that this Rice team has simply not been all that competitive in any game it has played.   The Owls have lost every contest this year by at least 17 points.

Just for example, see the Owls fall 36-17 at home against Vanderbilt, and think, "oh, well, they’re a halfway decent SEC club." And then see the Commodores score fewer than 36 points in all the rest of the games they’ve played this season – and lose to perennial doormat Army in overtime just a week ago.

No use prolonging this litany. Times are tough. And you know what Coach Bailiff says, first thing out of his mouth, after every loss. (For our only occasional readers: "Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.")

How 'bout some gift turnovers?

So where do we go from here? Well, it would help being the beneficiary of a seven-turnover game, as the Owls were in Hattiesburg two seasons ago when they broke their season-opening winless skein against Southern Miss. The Owls managed to eke out a 31-27 win in that one, and it did set the ‘07 season on at least a palatable path, both record-wise and developmentally. Three-and-eight in ‘07, 10-3 in ‘08.

But it isn’t likely that the methodical offense of ECU head coach Skip Holtz is going to cough up seven oskies Saturday afternoon – or even three or four. And short of that, this game is yet another tough order for the Institute Men.

Rather, the prescription for best chance to win on Saturday would appear to lie in two words: "hang around."

Coach Bailiff said this will be as physical – and as jumbo – a team as the Owls face all year. "They’re huge," he said. "They’re massive, in the offensive and defensive line. I’m talking 6-6 and 325 pounds."

Howsomever, the ECU offense hasn’t been in the habit of running up huge point totals (of course, neither was Vanderbilt’s). Nick Fanuzzi says his throwing arm is 100 per cent. One or two offensive linemen should come off the red-cross list. And the line showed palpable improvement last Saturday against Navy, Nick told us.

"I was so pround of the offensive line; they had a great game against Navy," Nick said. "I had a great time in the pocket; they just executed, they had a great game."

It’s good that Nick got that kind of protection against the Midshippersons Saturday, because he definitely had the red light on, as it pertained to quarterback scrambles.

"We were a little hesitant," the Rice head man said. "On a lot of those read calls the other night, we’d taken the read call off of him, just to make sure he’s healthy and not get hit a lot. But I think he showed you at Oklahoma State that he’s capable of making plays with his feet."

Mmm-hmm. That’s what we’re talkin’ about.

Consistent QB play, consistent offensive rhythm

"Nick at times showed he was playing for the first time in three weeks, at other times he looked absolutely brilliant," Coach Bailiff remarked. "I think we’ll get some consistent play out of thim this week; I think that will help our tempo; I think it will help our rhythm."

"You know and that’s what’s been so difficult offensively," DB added. "It was nice to have the same starting offensive line two weeks in a row. Those kids continue to improve every week. I think they protected the quarterback a lot better this week than they did the week before."

If the Rice offensive coaching brain trust just turns loose Nick Saturday, good things can happen. If, on the other hand, they continue the predictably boring and boringly predictable path followed thus far this season with increasing fervor, how, then, one might ask, can it be projected a way for the Owls to score enough points to outdistance even a plodding ECU offense. A succession of defensive pick-sixes?

A prescription for success on defense might include, oh, say three turnovers – and 60 minutes of play with the same intensity as was exhibited the first half of the Tulsa game.

On offense, here’s what we’re thinking about asking for: 60 yards rushing, net, by Nick Fanuzzi. A sustained drive for a score – at least three points – on the Owls’ first or second possession of the game. No more than one three-and-out per half (you laugh).

Quarterback Fanuzzi says it boils down to an even simpler prescription, at least on his side of the ball: "Work harder," he says, "and execute better when we get in the red zone – and eliminate turnovers."

Coach Bailiff said success was more a matter of making one’s own luck.

"We’ve got to work ourself back to be the lucky team," he insisted. "You do that through effort, you do that by perserverence."

"History’s full of a lot of guys and teams that have quit. We’re not going to do that. I know if we persevere; and continue to work hard, great things are in store for us."

--P.T.H.

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