Rice's pitching statistics were inflated by playing in the WeAC. They were not as good as their record, and were beatable. They had good hitting to compliment their pitching last year. This year all they had was the pitching.
The draft shows the quality of their pitching regardless the conference they played in. 3 guys in the first round explains their talent....just ask the scouts.
I agree with Tirk, ain't no way in hell all these scouts are dead wrong about these 3 pitchers. Yes the WeAC is not that great, but these pitchers are.
Someone posted the RPI numbers a couple of days ago and our region was not one of the weaker ones. Simply not true. And Rice lost to the weakest team in the entire tourney probably, a team with an 18-33 record.
If you can't score, you can't win ... they only had 3 runs against lowly Texas Southern in the first game and 7 when they played them again. And they only scored 24 runs the entire tourney.
Well, Texas A&M scored only 12 runs against TSU and the game wasn't as bad as the score indicates. I saw Southern, who usually hits well, only scored 7 runs in their loss to TSU. So, I think TSU got it together at conference time and made a really good run.
Any team who is 19-33 and has an RPI of 249 sucks in my book ... they may have improved towards the end, but they had lots of room to improve! Rice was overrated this year ... all they had was very good pitching, but the offense didn't produce like last year. And it was against very weak competition all year.
I read in the Houston Chronicle yesterday that Rice had two of their best position players unavailable for the regional. Kolkhorst was one of them, who I believe was the leadoff hitter and one of the heroes of last year's championship (.373 avg this year).
