Brett Heimer

A backup quarterback ran for 259 yards today and scored four touchdowns. Then he threw a 71 yard touchdown pass. That is five. It was the first start of his life. His name is Gael Ochoa. That is the second most rushing yards anybody has put up in a single game in the history of Rice football. His runs went for 55 yards, then 52, then 74, then 69. Rice lost. Florida Atlantic beat them 51 to 49 and the Owls are 1 and 7. Now here is how he got on that field at all. Ochoa is from El Paso. He went to Pebble Hills High School there, and out of high school he signed with UNLV. He never played a down for them. He redshirted his first year, and then UNLV went into the portal and brought in a quarterback from Virginia and a quarterback from Michigan, and Gael Ochoa was suddenly third in line at a job he had moved states for. So in January he put his name in the portal and came home to Texas. Rice took him. Understand what they took him as. Rice already had a starting quarterback lined up, a graduate transfer out of Central Florida named Jacurri Brown. Ochoa was signed as a developmental kid, somebody to bring along slowly over a couple of years. He was the backup. That was the plan. Then Brown got hurt. Twelve carries. 259 yards. That is 21 yards every single time he touched the football. Rice as a team ran for 499 yards and gained 608. And they still lost by two. Be honest about all of it. Rice is 1 and 7 and 0 and 4 in their league. Florida Atlantic scored 51 points on them and gave up 49, so this was not two good defenses, it was a track meet, and a lot of what Ochoa did came in enormous chunks against a defense that had stopped tackling. He has started one game. One. But think about where he was eleven months ago. He was a redshirt at a school 700 miles from home, behind two guys who had been brought in specifically to play over him, with no reason to believe anybody would ever hand him a football that mattered. He went home. He took a job where the plan was that he would not play for two years. And the first time anybody gave him the keys, the kid from El Paso put up the second biggest rushing day in a hundred and some years of Rice football. His team lost and it will barely be a footnote by Monday, and he will probably hand the job back when the starter is healthy. He still did it. When was the last time you got one chance and took it.