Rice Owls football The Rice Owls football team represents Rice University in NCAA Division I college football . The Owls have competed in Conference USA ' s Western Division since 2005 . Rice Stadium , built in 1950 , hosts the Owls ' home football games . Venue . Rice Stadium was built in 1950 , and has been the home of Owls football ever since . It hosted the NFL Super Bowl on January 1974 . It replaced the old Rice Field ( now Rice Track / Soccer Stadium ) to increase seating . Total seating capacity in the current stadium was reduced from 70 , 000 to 47 , 000 before the 2006 season . The endzone seating benches were removed and covered with tarps , and all of the wooden bleachers were replaced with new , metal seating benches in 2006 , as well . History . 1954 Cotton Bowl Classic . The Owls played in the eighteenth Cotton Bowl Classic against the Crimson Tide of Alabama . The game featured one of the most famous plays in college football history when Rice ' s Dickey Moegle ( later Maegle ) burst free on a sweep play , and on his way down the sideline , was tackled by Tommy Lewis , who had come off the Alabama sideline without his helmet to tackle Moegle . Referee Cliff Shaw saw Lewis come off the bench and gave the Owls the 95 yard touchdown . Rice would win the game 28 - 6 , with the only Crimson Tide score coming from Lewis . The yardage added to Moegle ' s 265 yards rushing , a Cotton Bowl Classic record that would stand until Tony Temple ' s effort in 2008 . This would be the Owls ' last bowl win until the 2008 Texas Bowl , a win which also secured the Owls their first 10 - win season since 1949 . Kennedy Speech . Rice Stadium also hosted a speech by John F . Kennedy on September 12 , 1962 . In it , he used the Rice football team to challenge America to send a man to the moon . Conference Championships . Southwest Conference : 1934 , 1937 , 1946 * , 1949 , 1953 * , 1957 , 1994 * Rivalries . SMU . Rice and SMU have been in the same conference with each other since the 1910s and have played each other 88 times as of 2010 with SMU leading the series 47 - 40 - 1 . The rivalry is due to the fact that Rice and SMU were two of four private schools in the old Southwest Conference ( Baylor and TCU were the others ) . Rice and SMU were the two smallest schools in the conference , were located in the two largest cities of any teams in the conference and have historically been considered the two best private universities in Texas . Houston . Rice participates in a crosstown rivalry with Houston . UH and Rice play annually for the Bayou Bucket , a weathered bucket found by former Rice guard Fred Curry at an antique shop . Curry had it designed into a trophy for $ 310 . The two universities are separated by five miles in Houston . The Cougars lead the series 24 - 10 , with Rice snapping a 3 game losing streak in 2008 . Texas . Rice and Texas have maintained a one - sided rivalry beginning in the early days of the Southwest Conference . Texas ' 28 consecutive victories from 1966 – 1993 represents the sixth longest single - opponent winning streak in college football history . In 1994 , in a nationally televised ESPN game , Rice scored a major upset win over Texas , but since then Texas has resumed series dominance . Despite the dissolution of the Southwest Conference , Texas and Rice still play on a " near annual " basis . Texas is a public university that enrolls 50 , 201 total students ( 5th largest in the US as of 2007 ) and over 37 , 000 undergraduates . Rice is a private university and enrolls 3 , 051 undergraduates .