Rice has fired Mike Bloomgren two thirds of the way through the coach's seventh season with the program, the university announced Sunday following a 17-10 loss to UConn in Week 9 that dropped the Owls to 2-6.
Associate coach Pete Alamar will serve as the interim head coach. Rice is scheduled to play Navy at home this weekend.
"I want to express my sincere appreciation to Coach Bloomgren. Over his seven seasons of service as our head football coach, he has represented our university and football program with the utmost class and integrity," said athletic director Tommy McClelland in a statement. "However, as I evaluated our program and compared our current and desired trajectory, I determined new leadership is necessary to guide us into the future."
Bloomgren finishes with a record of 24-52 and a pair of bowl appearances in 2022 and 2023; however, the former was as a five-win team that qualified for the postseason due to a lack of bowl-eligible teams. Last year, the Owls reached the First Responder Bowl with a 6-6 mark but lost to finish 6-7. Bloomgren never led Rice to a winning season.
Still, reaching a bowl in the team's first season as a member of the American Athletic Conference, as well as a 4-4 record in conference play (Rice never won more than three conference games in Conference USA under Bloomgren) led to some optimism for the Owls leading into 2024. Clearly, that optimism has been squashed.
Bloomgren was hired to replace David Bailiff ahead of the 2018 season following a successful stint as Stanford's offensive coordinator. The thought process behind the hire was Bloomgren's time with a successful Stanford program, another school with more stringent academic requirements than most FBS schools, would help him turn around a Rice program that has had only five winning seasons since the turn of the century. While Rice made incremental gains under Bloomgren, it seems the results weren't good enough.