Rice to hunker down at TCU

Aug 28, 2017 - 5:39 PM The Rice football team will temporarily relocate to Texas Christian University as a result of Tropical Storm Harvey after returning to the United States on Monday morning from Australia, where it played its season opener.

The Owls could not return home to their Houston campus following their 62-7 loss to Stanford in the second annual Sydney Cup.

The remnants of Hurricane Harvey continued dumping historic levels of rainfall on the Houston area Monday and caused the shutdown of both major airports. The National Weather Service said flooding isn't expected to peak until Wednesday or Thursday. Some areas of southeast Texas around Houston have already seen more than 30 inches of rain.

The tropical storm was set to re-enter the Gulf of Mexico later Monday and make another landfall closer to Houston around two days later, prolonging the flooding disaster.

The Owls landed in Los Angeles at approximately 9:30 a.m. ET Monday and will head to Fort Worth next, with an expected arrival time of 3 p.m. ET, according to ESPN. The team will stay at TCU until it is safe to travel to Houston.

"I want to thank the staffs at TCU, SMU, Baylor and UTEP who all reached out to offer whatever help we needed," Rice coach David Bailiff said. "There is a strong brotherhood in the coaching world, and it is never more evident than at times like these. While we would love to be coming home today, our first responsibility is the safety of these players. We learned some lessons in 2008 (when the Owls were at Vanderbilt when Hurricane Ike struck Houston) about coming home too soon."

TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte was Rice's AD for three years before going to TCU in 2009.

The Owls are off this week and next play on Sept. 9 at UTEP.

Meanwhile, the Houston Cougars went to Austin on Friday ahead of their season opener on Saturday at Texas-San Antonio, which is just about 80 miles from Austin. The Cougars practiced at the University of Texas campus.

Officials from Houston and Texas-San Antonio remain in contact and are "monitoring the situation."