The Turning Point
9/8/2022 9:49:00 PM | Football
In the gloom of a loss at Memphis, an unlikely voice issued a challenge, and the Owls responded.
Any retelling of a stirring comeback in sports requires the identification of a turning point, a moment when a season seemingly doomed to disappointment suddenly and improbably rights itself and becomes a campaign to remember.
Rice football in 2012 was no exception.
The members of that team who will be celebrated at Friday night's Huddle Up event and recognized again on the field during Saturday's home opener with McNeese saw their collective psyches tested by the best and worst of what college football can deliver.
The Owls headed into 2012 ready to prove the lessons learned over three previous lean years had prepared the team for success.
"I remember thinking we had enough guys who had played enough football together that it was time," said Taylor McHargue, who was heading into his third year as the starter at quarterback. "We knew the non-conference would be challenging, but it always is. We felt that we were going to be pretty good."
A milestone walk-off win at Kansas thanks to Chris Boswell's field goal as time expired was followed by an emotional week leading up to hosting Marshall with the passing of head coach David's Bailiff's mother. A storybook ending to that game seemed in play until it was cruelly ripped from the Owls in the final moments as McHargue injured his shoulder after an improbable scramble to the Marshall one-yard line. Rice could only kick a field goal to send the game to overtime, where The Herd prevailed 54-51.
"It felt like we couldn't catch a break the entire first half of the year," McHargue noted. "You hear a lot of people talk about how it takes a while for a team to learn how to win and that was us. We could not get over the hump against teams that were just a little better than us."
Driphus Jackson would start against Houston the following week but suffered an injury that left him unavailable for the trip to Memphis the following week.
McHargue bravely returned to the lineup against the winless Tigers, but much of the normal game plan was unavailable in order to protect him from further injury. "Memphis was not a very good team and I think we thought at the time we could go up and beat them with a limited offense. All the run game stuff for me was out of the game plan.
"We were always backed up, never started a series on their side of the 50," McHargue recalled. "As confident as I was in the Marshall game (leading the late comeback), the Memphis game was the most helpless feeling I had as a player. I was tapped out and there wasn't a lot I could do. That was the lowest point of my time at Rice."
Cornerback Phillip Gaines took matters into his own hands, scooping up a fumble early and returning it for a score and a Boswell field goal later in the half gave the Owls a 10-0 lead. It seemed the Owls might grind out a win, but after an extended halftime as a heavy rain storm chilled the air and kicked up a stout wind, fate turned against them in the second half as a series of penalties pinned them in their own end of the field and Memphis came back to win 14-10.
The Owls were battered, bruised, and 1-5. The math was formidable, with the bowl threshold of six wins requiring near perfection the rest of the year from a team whose good luck had seemingly played out in Lawrence, Kansas four weeks earlier.
But in a moment where the season seemed all but over, a player (Gaines) who spoke loudly with his stellar play while being a man of otherwise few words stood up in a somber postgame locker room on a rainy night in Memphis and laid down a challenge that grew in reputation with each win by the Owls over the last five weeks of the season.
Gaines came into the 2012 season hungry to make up for the lost time the previous year after an injury knocked him out of action after just three games. While he sat on the sidelines, he saw true freshman cornerback Bryce Callahan blossom into a Freshman All-America after moving into the rotation in Gaines' absence.
The arrival of Chris Thurmond in the spring of 2012 as the new defensive coordinator and cornerback coach figured to be the perfect catalyst for Gaines and Callahan to become one of the best pair of defensive backs the Owls had employed.
"The combination of them (Thurmond and Callahan) was great for me personally and I think the defense as well," Gaines recalled. "Coach Thurm brought a different approach and let us be ourselves within his defense. He is a great man and coach who would give us quotes all the time that would reflect on life and not just football. When he came in, I feel like he made it easier to just play fast and not overthink anything."
"He (Thurmond) always preached to play fast, make a decision and go with it. He gave the defense a lot of confidence and they played loose and fast," McHargue recalled. "We already knew how good Phillip was and Bryce had a great freshman year, but I don't think any of us expected him to be that good. We could tell we had something really special with the two of them (during 2012 training camp).
Callahan and Gaines had shone brightly in the season's first six games, with Callahan delivering a pair of interceptions to spark the Owls' comeback win at Kansas, and Gaines leading the nation in pass breakups.
They were just two of an obviously talented assemblage of players (seven would go on to play in the NFL and an eighth became an Olympian) who were staring at a 1-5 record as they gathered in the visitor's locker room at Liberty Bowl stadium.
At some point during Bailiff's postgame message to the team in which he told the team that he and his staff needed to do a better job in preparing the team, Gaines was spurred to stand up and speak his mind.
"The Memphis game was a tough one because we had lost to an 0-4 team while leading 10-0. Coaches make calls but players win games. Football is such a physical sport they can only do so much from the sideline, and it comes to a point where whatever call they make, you have to find a way to get it done. There is no defensive play call that is perfect enough to stop every play, so it always falls back on us. We had too many solid players to not be able to line up in any offense or defense and not win.
"I was frustrated because the easiest cop-out is to blame other people and the only way to win is to be better than the person across from you" Gaines recalled. "I wasn't planning to speak up because I'm not the hype-em-up type of guy. But losing to me was unacceptable so I guess I had to get it off my chest. I don't remember too much about it but just challenged everybody to hold themselves accountable and find a way to win."
"Phillip was challenging us, telling us we were so much better than this," McHargue recalled. "He didn't say it directly, but we all understood coach's job was on the line. We were running out of time to make a bowl and we are playing fire with our coach's job."
It was an uncharacteristic moment for Gaines and one that would loom increasing large over the last six games of the season.
"For a speech like that to really hit, the player has to be good. To come from a player like Phillip who was usually soft-spoken, he had to be really mad to do that—and he was. It's something we talked about the rest of my time at Rice and we still talk about it."
The Owls returned home for a win over a fledgling UTSA program in a game celebrating the Rice Centennial that brought some good cheer to the postgame locker room. But the following week the fragile momentum seemed all but crushed at Tulsa when the Hurricanes, who were undefeated in the conference and 6-1 overall, rallied late to stymie the Owls 28-24.
A 44-17 win over Southern Miss at Rice Stadium was a welcomed chance to extend playing time deep into the roster and also return a winning feeling to the locker room. A shoot-out the following week at Tulane saw Gaines break the school record with his 17th pass breakup of the season and then broke up another to foil the Green Wave's two-point conversion attempt in the final moments of the game and move the season record to 4-6.
The Owls put their week off after the Tulane game to good use, refreshing and recuperating in advance of the final two-game push to reach bowl eligibility.
SMU came to town needing one win of its own to reach bowl qualification, but five Boswell field goals and a stout defensive effort shackled the Mustangs and allowed Rice to match SMU with a 5-6 record.
A week later, the Owls would tune out the pregame publicity over UTEP coach Mike Price announcing his retirement and maintain their focus, cementing a 33-24 win with a 97-yard kickoff return by the Owls' 240-pound kick returner Jeremy Eddington and setting off a memorable celebration in the locker room that emphatically spoke to the value of the berth to a team that seven weeks earlier would not have allowed such thoughts to enter their minds.
"Whenever I do interviews or go on radio shows and they talk about there being too many bowls, I talk about what that locker room experience was like. Those games are important to their fan bases and if it's not for you, don't watch. But for a lot of schools, those bowls are the ultimate goal for their seasons, McHargue added.
After the roller-coaster regular season, it came as no surprise that this battle-tested group would not let a halftime deficit or the loss of McHargue to an injury stand in the way of completing the season in style. They outscored Air Force 26-0 in the second half and rolled to a 33-14 win and close their season as Armed Forces Bowl champions.
The majority of that team would build upon the surge at the end of 2012 the following season, earning the right to host the Conference USA Championship against the same Marshall team that had inflicted a gut-wrenching loss the year before. The Owls routed The Herd 41-24 to win Rice's first outright conference title in football since 1954 and allow Gaines to end his career, ironically enough, at the same stadium (the Liberty Bowl) where his words had proved to be a rallying point for all that followed.
"That stretch of four games to end the (2012) season was the freest, the most cut-it-loose football we played the entire time I was at Rice," McHargue said. "The play calling, the scheme, the way we approached each week. The coaches coached as if there was no tomorrow and we played like that. It definitely laid the groundwork for what was to follow in 2013."
The memories of 2012 remain sweet to Gaines, who has returned to Rice after a seven-year NFL career to finish his degree while passing on his acquired knowledge to the next generation of Rice cornerbacks.
Unsurprisingly, he chooses to remember the great efforts of his teammates on the field as the turning point in 2012, not his postgame words in Memphis.
"What was said was said and we, fortunately, put some wins together. I personally don't think my words can take credit for too much because we still had to go out and perform.
"The main thing I remember from the rest of the season was just finally getting enough wins to make it to a bowl game. We finally had a shot to join the dance and with the momentum, we had going in I felt we were playing good football and were a hard team to beat. Looking back now our team had a bunch of players that made it to the league and into training camps so there was no reason that we shouldn't have been winning in the first place.
"I'm just glad we turned it around and got a ring."
Rice football in 2012 was no exception.
The members of that team who will be celebrated at Friday night's Huddle Up event and recognized again on the field during Saturday's home opener with McNeese saw their collective psyches tested by the best and worst of what college football can deliver.
The Owls headed into 2012 ready to prove the lessons learned over three previous lean years had prepared the team for success.
"I remember thinking we had enough guys who had played enough football together that it was time," said Taylor McHargue, who was heading into his third year as the starter at quarterback. "We knew the non-conference would be challenging, but it always is. We felt that we were going to be pretty good."
A milestone walk-off win at Kansas thanks to Chris Boswell's field goal as time expired was followed by an emotional week leading up to hosting Marshall with the passing of head coach David's Bailiff's mother. A storybook ending to that game seemed in play until it was cruelly ripped from the Owls in the final moments as McHargue injured his shoulder after an improbable scramble to the Marshall one-yard line. Rice could only kick a field goal to send the game to overtime, where The Herd prevailed 54-51.
"It felt like we couldn't catch a break the entire first half of the year," McHargue noted. "You hear a lot of people talk about how it takes a while for a team to learn how to win and that was us. We could not get over the hump against teams that were just a little better than us."
Driphus Jackson would start against Houston the following week but suffered an injury that left him unavailable for the trip to Memphis the following week.
McHargue bravely returned to the lineup against the winless Tigers, but much of the normal game plan was unavailable in order to protect him from further injury. "Memphis was not a very good team and I think we thought at the time we could go up and beat them with a limited offense. All the run game stuff for me was out of the game plan.
"We were always backed up, never started a series on their side of the 50," McHargue recalled. "As confident as I was in the Marshall game (leading the late comeback), the Memphis game was the most helpless feeling I had as a player. I was tapped out and there wasn't a lot I could do. That was the lowest point of my time at Rice."
Cornerback Phillip Gaines took matters into his own hands, scooping up a fumble early and returning it for a score and a Boswell field goal later in the half gave the Owls a 10-0 lead. It seemed the Owls might grind out a win, but after an extended halftime as a heavy rain storm chilled the air and kicked up a stout wind, fate turned against them in the second half as a series of penalties pinned them in their own end of the field and Memphis came back to win 14-10.
The Owls were battered, bruised, and 1-5. The math was formidable, with the bowl threshold of six wins requiring near perfection the rest of the year from a team whose good luck had seemingly played out in Lawrence, Kansas four weeks earlier.
But in a moment where the season seemed all but over, a player (Gaines) who spoke loudly with his stellar play while being a man of otherwise few words stood up in a somber postgame locker room on a rainy night in Memphis and laid down a challenge that grew in reputation with each win by the Owls over the last five weeks of the season.
Gaines came into the 2012 season hungry to make up for the lost time the previous year after an injury knocked him out of action after just three games. While he sat on the sidelines, he saw true freshman cornerback Bryce Callahan blossom into a Freshman All-America after moving into the rotation in Gaines' absence.
The arrival of Chris Thurmond in the spring of 2012 as the new defensive coordinator and cornerback coach figured to be the perfect catalyst for Gaines and Callahan to become one of the best pair of defensive backs the Owls had employed.
"The combination of them (Thurmond and Callahan) was great for me personally and I think the defense as well," Gaines recalled. "Coach Thurm brought a different approach and let us be ourselves within his defense. He is a great man and coach who would give us quotes all the time that would reflect on life and not just football. When he came in, I feel like he made it easier to just play fast and not overthink anything."
"He (Thurmond) always preached to play fast, make a decision and go with it. He gave the defense a lot of confidence and they played loose and fast," McHargue recalled. "We already knew how good Phillip was and Bryce had a great freshman year, but I don't think any of us expected him to be that good. We could tell we had something really special with the two of them (during 2012 training camp).
Callahan and Gaines had shone brightly in the season's first six games, with Callahan delivering a pair of interceptions to spark the Owls' comeback win at Kansas, and Gaines leading the nation in pass breakups.
They were just two of an obviously talented assemblage of players (seven would go on to play in the NFL and an eighth became an Olympian) who were staring at a 1-5 record as they gathered in the visitor's locker room at Liberty Bowl stadium.
At some point during Bailiff's postgame message to the team in which he told the team that he and his staff needed to do a better job in preparing the team, Gaines was spurred to stand up and speak his mind.
"The Memphis game was a tough one because we had lost to an 0-4 team while leading 10-0. Coaches make calls but players win games. Football is such a physical sport they can only do so much from the sideline, and it comes to a point where whatever call they make, you have to find a way to get it done. There is no defensive play call that is perfect enough to stop every play, so it always falls back on us. We had too many solid players to not be able to line up in any offense or defense and not win.
"I was frustrated because the easiest cop-out is to blame other people and the only way to win is to be better than the person across from you" Gaines recalled. "I wasn't planning to speak up because I'm not the hype-em-up type of guy. But losing to me was unacceptable so I guess I had to get it off my chest. I don't remember too much about it but just challenged everybody to hold themselves accountable and find a way to win."
"Phillip was challenging us, telling us we were so much better than this," McHargue recalled. "He didn't say it directly, but we all understood coach's job was on the line. We were running out of time to make a bowl and we are playing fire with our coach's job."
It was an uncharacteristic moment for Gaines and one that would loom increasing large over the last six games of the season.
"For a speech like that to really hit, the player has to be good. To come from a player like Phillip who was usually soft-spoken, he had to be really mad to do that—and he was. It's something we talked about the rest of my time at Rice and we still talk about it."
The Owls returned home for a win over a fledgling UTSA program in a game celebrating the Rice Centennial that brought some good cheer to the postgame locker room. But the following week the fragile momentum seemed all but crushed at Tulsa when the Hurricanes, who were undefeated in the conference and 6-1 overall, rallied late to stymie the Owls 28-24.
A 44-17 win over Southern Miss at Rice Stadium was a welcomed chance to extend playing time deep into the roster and also return a winning feeling to the locker room. A shoot-out the following week at Tulane saw Gaines break the school record with his 17th pass breakup of the season and then broke up another to foil the Green Wave's two-point conversion attempt in the final moments of the game and move the season record to 4-6.
The Owls put their week off after the Tulane game to good use, refreshing and recuperating in advance of the final two-game push to reach bowl eligibility.
SMU came to town needing one win of its own to reach bowl qualification, but five Boswell field goals and a stout defensive effort shackled the Mustangs and allowed Rice to match SMU with a 5-6 record.
A week later, the Owls would tune out the pregame publicity over UTEP coach Mike Price announcing his retirement and maintain their focus, cementing a 33-24 win with a 97-yard kickoff return by the Owls' 240-pound kick returner Jeremy Eddington and setting off a memorable celebration in the locker room that emphatically spoke to the value of the berth to a team that seven weeks earlier would not have allowed such thoughts to enter their minds.
"Whenever I do interviews or go on radio shows and they talk about there being too many bowls, I talk about what that locker room experience was like. Those games are important to their fan bases and if it's not for you, don't watch. But for a lot of schools, those bowls are the ultimate goal for their seasons, McHargue added.
After the roller-coaster regular season, it came as no surprise that this battle-tested group would not let a halftime deficit or the loss of McHargue to an injury stand in the way of completing the season in style. They outscored Air Force 26-0 in the second half and rolled to a 33-14 win and close their season as Armed Forces Bowl champions.
The majority of that team would build upon the surge at the end of 2012 the following season, earning the right to host the Conference USA Championship against the same Marshall team that had inflicted a gut-wrenching loss the year before. The Owls routed The Herd 41-24 to win Rice's first outright conference title in football since 1954 and allow Gaines to end his career, ironically enough, at the same stadium (the Liberty Bowl) where his words had proved to be a rallying point for all that followed.
"That stretch of four games to end the (2012) season was the freest, the most cut-it-loose football we played the entire time I was at Rice," McHargue said. "The play calling, the scheme, the way we approached each week. The coaches coached as if there was no tomorrow and we played like that. It definitely laid the groundwork for what was to follow in 2013."
The memories of 2012 remain sweet to Gaines, who has returned to Rice after a seven-year NFL career to finish his degree while passing on his acquired knowledge to the next generation of Rice cornerbacks.
Unsurprisingly, he chooses to remember the great efforts of his teammates on the field as the turning point in 2012, not his postgame words in Memphis.
"What was said was said and we, fortunately, put some wins together. I personally don't think my words can take credit for too much because we still had to go out and perform.
"The main thing I remember from the rest of the season was just finally getting enough wins to make it to a bowl game. We finally had a shot to join the dance and with the momentum, we had going in I felt we were playing good football and were a hard team to beat. Looking back now our team had a bunch of players that made it to the league and into training camps so there was no reason that we shouldn't have been winning in the first place.
"I'm just glad we turned it around and got a ring."
WBB: Rice vs. Marshall Postgame Presser
Wednesday, March 09
VB: Rice-Texas Postgame Presser
Saturday, December 04
VB: Rice-San Diego Postgame Presser
Thursday, December 02