Bowling in New Orleans

It's still technically unofficial until a formal announcement by Conference USA at noon today, but as Moisekapenda Bower reports in the Chron, the Rice Owls will be headed to New Orleans for their bowl game. If you plan to attend and you want to be counted towards the "official" tally of Rice fans travelling to the game, use this link to buy your tickets:

Rice Online Ticket Office - 2006 R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl

The game is December 22 in New Orleans. I feel confident that a lot of Owl fans will make the trek for what will be the first opportunity ever for many of them to attend a bowl game that features the Owls.

The Owls get a little love from the national media here and here. One correction that needs to be made, however:

With Saturday's 31-27 win over SMU, the Owls finished with a 7-5 record after winning their last six games and are eligible to play in a postseason bowl game for the first time since 1961.

Actually, the Owls have been bowl eligible four times in recent years - 1996, 1997, 1998, and 2001. They also went 6-5 in 1992 and 1993, but had a win over Division I-AA Sam Houston State in those seasons, and you needed six I-A wins to be bowl eligible back then. (Under today's rules, they'd have been eligible.) The 7-4 Rice teams of '96 and '97 very much deserved bowl bids, as did the 8-4 2001 squad, but the WAC did not have enough tie-ins to land them in one, so they were bypassed. The accurate statement is that this is the first Rice team to receive a bowl berth since 1961.

But let's not get bogged down in semantics. Rice is going to a bowl game. That's really all you need to know.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on November 28, 2006 to Other sports | TrackBack