First full day of the college football season and we’re kicking off our new blog. Welcome. Thanks for visiting. Come back often.

Let’s look at a football play for you. Over his long tenure, Ken Hatfield did a nice job at Rice but the past couple of years have been disastrous, particularly defensively. The Owls gave up an astronomical 39 points and 441 yards last season. Under new coach Todd Graham they return roughly half their defense. Now Graham has a defensive background (defensive coordinator at Tulsa, co-DC at West Virginia) and at Tulsa worked first hand with Steve Kragthorpe in that reclamation project. But Tulsa’s D has been no prize and Rice simply doesn’t have the horses to be effective defensively. The Owls must enhance their talent level. Even improving the D by a TD and 40 yards leaves them as a 400 yard D giving up over 4½ TD’s per game. Houston and 9th year (at least it seems that way) QB Kevin Kolb are poised to light up the Rice D. Kolb has started 36 straight games for Houston and if, as expected, he has a big senior year, the Cougars will improve on last season’s 28 points and 441 yards per game.

Houston’s defense is no prize, but this 27-point, 397-yard unit from last year should improve with 9 returning starters. And can Rice move the ball at all? They’re going from option to spread under 27-year old offensive coordinator Major Applewhite. No stretch to say that Applewhite was hired for the cache his name has in recruiting the state of Texas as opposed to the work he did as quarterbacks coach at Syracuse, where the QB’s combined for a mere 6 TD passes last year in the nation’s 105th ranked passing offense. Though Rice threw the ball more the past couple of years, it will take some time to turn Hatfield’s option personnel into a cohesive spread offense.

While laying points with a shaky defense should give you reason to pause, the Rice offense may pretty helpless early. Rice is unveiling some stadium improvements but really have no discernable home field edge with Houston brining plenty of fans a mere 6 miles across town. Despite concerns about the ability of favorites to stretch out leads with the new college clock rules, a comfortable 3TD+ win by the Cougars will be no surprise. Houston may be one of the better big favorite plays on the board this week.

Thanks for reading this far. Remember to visit www.FootballAnnual.com to get your 16-page football annual for free. Good luck this opening weekend, and be careful.