5 seniors deepen already top class
Last week, football players across the country put pen to paper and signed letters of intent for their respective college teams.
Programs filled out their rosters with players ready to take the next step in their journeys. That is, besides Rice.
Instead, Owls coach Mike Bloomgren took meetings and continued preparing for spring football (beginning March 1), knowing his entire 2021 recruiting class was completed during the “real” signing period.
“I think we all know that signing day has moved,” Bloomgren said. “It’s really not Feb. 3 like we all thought of it growing up. Signing day is the third Wednesday in December.”
In 2017, the NCAA incorporated an early signing period to the recruiting cycle. Since then, a majority of players have taken to signing their NLIs in December rather than waiting for February, whether to secure an early scholarship or be able to enroll in time for the spring semester.
It seems every player going to Rice felt the same way, as all 20 members of the incoming class signed during the early period. This includes 17 freshmen and three transfers (two grad transfers and one from junior college).
In addition to the incoming class, the Owls will have some familiar faces returning. Five “super seniors,” as Bloomgren calls them, have decided to stay at Rice, taking advantage of the extra year of eligibility afforded to college athletes by the NCAA due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That group consists of tight end Jordan Myers, defensive lineman Elijah Garcia, offensive lineman Jovaun Woolford and safeties George Nyakwol and Naeem Smith.
With a high number of major contributors returning, it isn’t just the recruits who have Bloomgren and the Owls eager to start the 2021 season.
“Those five and the fact that they chose to come back because they feel so good about what we’re building here and they love their teammates and their coaches so much, that means everything,” Bloomgren said. “That is the best recruiting we could’ve done.”
Keeping veterans around is always going to be a huge benefit for any college football program. But in the end, the strength of the recruiting class shows which direction a program is heading, making Rice’s incoming class all the more important.
As far as rankings go, the 2021 class is the third in a row to land in the top five in program history. Rice landed the seventh-highest rated player in team history in D.J. Arkansas, an outside linebacker from Denton Ryan. And though the previous class had a better average rating, this year’s class is the first to land in the top five in Conference USA since 2013 (according to 247sports).
Bloomgren has looked for the best players “from sea to shining sea” since he was hired in December 2017, but he’s also made it clear how much he looks at Texas when searching for best fits for his program.
He said he would love to have a 50-50 balance between in- and outof-state recruits if it consisted of the right players, but keeping things Texas-centric is still a priority.
“The best high school football in the nation and the best coaches in the nation are in our backyard,” Bloomgren said. “So the way I balance it is if we ever got to a point where we took more of our class from outside of the state of Texas, I think that would be a head-scratcher for me.”
While the pandemic has given seniors another opportunity to play at the college level, it did ravage the normal recruiting cycle.
Instead of having recruits on campus and going to watch their games in person, Bloomgren and his staff had to rely on Zoom meetings and film to figure out who they wanted to bring to Rice.
Still, Bloomgren and his staff found who they thought were the right players and filled out a recruiting class. Though it is tougher to develop a deeper relationship with a player virtually, Bloomgren believes each member of the 2021 recruiting class represents what he wants the Owls to be.
When asked for one word to describe the incoming class, Bloomgren instead gave two: “Rice Owls.”
“They fit everything that we’re looking for,” Bloomgren said, “from intellectual mentality to loving the game of football to wanting to get the best of both worlds in terms of a world-class education and playing big-time college football.”