Jacurri Brown carried 23 times for 128 yards and a touchdown Saturday and completed 11 of 18 passes for 121 yards and another score, accounting for 249 of Rice's 330 total yards, and the Owls lost 28-21 at home to Western Michigan anyway. The reason sits in one line of the box score. Rice converted 1 of 10 third downs. Rice rushed for 209 yards at 4.8 a carry, and turned it into 21 points.
That is a strange kind of encouraging. Rice head coach Abell's option is built on the extreme split Rice showed in his first season, 204.7 rushing yards a game against 97.6 passing, and after the 52-0 wreck at Notre Dame, where Rice gained just 128 total yards and went 2 of 12 on third down, the running game genuinely came back. Brown did it without the offense giving anything away. Rice committed zero turnovers, and Brown threw no interceptions on 18 attempts. The drives just stopped.
Fresno State, 9 p.m. Central Saturday on The CW Network
Rice is 1-2 and closes nonconference play at Fresno State. The model gives the Owls about a 5% chance, and that number is honest. This is a road game against a better team, and Rice has now lost two in a row.
What makes it worth watching anyway is that Matt Entz has told anyone listening exactly how he plans to handle Rice. Previewing the Owls, Entz said, "The triple option is a little more assignment driven. We have to be great with the eyes," and noted that Rice's quarterback has more than 50 carries on the season. He is not treating Brown as a talent problem to out-athlete. He is treating the offense as a discipline problem to solve, which is the harder version for Rice, because assignment-sound defenses are precisely what turns a 6-yard option gain into third-and-4 and then a punt.
Brown cannot fix that alone, and right now he is close to being asked to. Tyvonn Byars scored Rice's other rushing touchdown, and that was about all the help the backfield offered. Quinton Jackson was out again; Abell has called the knee injury significant and said Jackson would be out for a while, with no timeline, and Davis Lane was absent too. That is why Brown took 23 carries.
The specific thing to watch, then, is not yardage. It is what happens on second-and-6. Rice needs the dive and the pitch to produce four or five yards early in a series so third down is short enough that Brown's legs are a real answer instead of a desperation option.
The defense earned a little more trust than the scoreboard suggests
Jon Kay's rebuilt unit held Western Michigan quarterback Broc Lowry to 70 percent passing for 116 yards and pressured him for two sacks, forced a three-and-out on Western Michigan's first possession and a punt on its second, and forced four Western Michigan fumbles. Two explosive plays set up Western Michigan's touchdowns, a 66-yard run and a 34-yard touchdown catch.
That is a unit that has improved on the grind and has not yet learned to stop the one snap that ends an afternoon. Complicating it, defensive end and captain Chibby Nwajuaku was hurt against Western Michigan and did not return, and nothing has been reported about whether he plays Saturday. Losing an edge player who sets the perimeter is not a small thing for a defense already replacing most of its 2025 production.
What a good night actually looks like
Rice has not had a winning season since before Abell arrived, and at 1-2 with UTSA and the rest of the American waiting, a road upset at Fresno State would be the kind of result that changes the arithmetic of this year in a single night. It is unlikely. Root for it anyway. Five percent is not zero, and Brown at his Western Michigan best is a genuinely difficult player to defend for four quarters.
But the version of Saturday that matters even in a loss is the one where Rice's third-down number has a different shape, five or six conversions, a couple of long possessions, the option finishing what it starts against a staff that spent the week specifically preparing not to let it. Do that in Fresno, against a defense watching for exactly this, and the Owls take something real into conference play.
For the full picture, see the interactive guide and the methodology.