I’ve been really looking forward to this one. It was our home opener and we thrashed them, 34-7. It was still early in the season, though, and while Rice was looking very strong, the conference and national pictures were still far from clear. Here’s what Rice Sports Information Director Bill Whitmore had to say about the state of play before the game:
Just for fun, here are a couple of pages from the scrapbook that I found irresistible:
And here’s the Thresher piece about the victory (I went ahead and gave you the entire page since people seemed to enjoy that last time):
Note also the sense of great anticipation for the next game, against Duke. Remember the Thresher came out at the end of the week, so by the time these stories were written people had had a chance to digest the decisive Stanford win and begin daring to believe that it might be possible to beat the powerful Duke squad.
Was anything else happening on campus that week? Why, yes. Everyone had the flu. (Just an observation: although this isn’t a particularly sparkling example, Peanuts was once a great and supremely subversive comic strip.)
Anything else? Well, Sputnik went up that week. It seemed to have the adults in a tizzy, but that all paled beside the Duke game.