Tulane Underdogs to Rice on Saturday
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The Tulane football team is on the road Saturday in Houston against Rice and oddsmakers are saying it'll be the Owls who will be victorious, with DraftKings putting Rice at a 2.5-point advantage.
It's only the second time the Owls have been favored this season. The only other time Rice was the team giving away the points was their season-opening game against Houston Christian out of the Southland Conference, the same league that has Nicholls, Southeastern, McNeese, and Northwestern State as its football-playing members.
The Green Wave was trounced at home on Saturday by Tulsa, 60-10, dropping the Wave to 4-5 on the year and eliminating any chance they had at making it a fifth straight trip to the American Conference championship game. The loss placed the Wave at 2-3 in league games.
See The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly from the Tulsa game here.
Rice is 1-8 on the year and hasn't won a Conference game this season in five tries.
Scouting the Owls
The Owls are a run-first offense, utilizing what's called a "gun-choice" option attack. Instead of lining up under center the offense operates out of the shotgun or pistol, similar to a triple option that Army employs. Rice averages 270-yards per game on the ground, while barely throwing the ball, putting up around 93-yards a game through the air.
Transfer quarterback Jacurri Brown leads the team in rushing, with 686-yards on the ground, and passing, with 478-yards through the air. An ankle injury kept him from being 100% for the Florida Atlantic game. Freshman Gael Ochoa lead the Owls to 49-points in their loss to FAU, accounting for 325-yards and five rushing scores.
In their eight losses this year, Rice has averaged giving up almost 38-points per game, including the last two contests at Florida Atlantic and North Texas, where the Owls surrendered 51 and 52-points respectively. Their closest loss was at home against UTSA, falling 16-14 to the Roadrunners.
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Doug has covered a gamut of sporting events in his fifty-plus years in the field. He started doing sideline reporting for Louisiana Tech football games for the student radio station. Doug was Sports Director for KNOE-AM/FM in Monroe in the mid-80s, winning numerous awards from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association for Best Sportscast and Best Play-by-Play. High school play-by-play for teams in Monroe, Natchitoches, New Orleans, and Thibodaux, LA dot his resume. He did college play-by-play for Northwestern State University in Natchitoches for nine years. Then, moving to the Crescent City, Doug did television PBP of Tulane games and even filled in for legendary Tulane broadcaster, Ken Berthelot in the only game Kenny ever missed while doing the Green Wave games. His father was an alumnus of Tulane in the 1940s, so Doug has attended Tulane football games in old Tulane Stadium, the Superdome, and Yulman. He was one of the 86,000 plus on December 1, 1973, sitting in the North End Zone to seeTulane shutout the LSU Tigers, 14-0. He was there when the Posse ruled Fogelman and in Turchin when the Wave made it to the World Series. He currently is the public address voice of the Tulane baseball team.