By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

HOUSTON — College football returns to the Rice University campus for the 93rd season tomorrow when the Owls host the University of Hawai'i, and not for the first time is the sport's return shadowed by the nagging question of whether it still belongs here.

Its Romanesque campus on the city's fashionable south side, small (2,713 undergraduates), academically reknown Rice is a curiosity on the Division I-A landscape: An intimate Ivy-level institution still desperately trying to hang onto major college football.

While Brown and Cornell, two schools that bookended Rice in 2003 U. S. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges" rankings play at the I-AA level and others have dropped football altogether, the Owls stubbornly chase success in the I-A ranks despite severe handicaps.

The 54-year old 70,000-seat Rice Stadium that will likely be two-thirds empty for tomorrow's 2:05 (Hawai'i time) game looms as a reminder of the long-gone but not forgotten glory days of the 1930s-'50s.

Rice's athletic department operates at an annual $10 million deficit, in part because of a football program that has had only five winning seasons in the past 31 years and hasn't been to a bowl since 1961.

This despite admitting many athletes whose SAT scores are, on average, 300 points below those of the rest of the student body, whose 25/75 percentile SATs were 1,320 to 1,520.

Twice in the past 11 years, most recently this spring, committees have been formed and studies undertaken to decide whether the school should continue with football and top level athletics.

Each time players and alumni have rallied around what football coach Ken Hatfield calls, "the importance of athletics to the diversity of the school" and convinced the Board of Trustees to retain it. But not without some nervous times, especially this spring.

Dropping football, a consultant's report said in May could save the school $3.4 million dollars. The report by McKinsey & Company for the Rice trustees favorably discussed dropping to Division I-AAA, "as an opportunity to bow out of the football arms race, build more competitive teams in other sports and actively work to achieve broad athletic excellence on par with Rice's academic reputation."

Ultimately the board in June unanimously chose to continue its I-A path and, "rededicate itself to I-A athletics" in a more efficient, financially sound framework.

Hatfield and his players, as if almost given a reprieve, have rededicated themselves to making the most of the opportunity.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.