Rice's football team will settle in Fort Worth and practice at TCU for the foreseeable future, Owls' AD Joe Karlgaard told CBS Sports Monday morning.
The flooding from Hurricane Harvey has made a return to the Rice campus impossible at the moment. The Rice traveling party was connecting in Los Angeles Monday morning after flying from Sydney, Australia for Saturday's season opener against Stanford.
From there, they were flying directly to DFW International Airport, instead of Houston. Rice does not play again until Sept. 9.
Rice's football traveling party does not know when it can return to campus.
"That's a good question. Even if the campus is fine, we're not sure about the main arteries into Houston," Karlgaard said.
TCU and Horned Frogs' AD Chris Del Conte has offered the program's facilities to the Owls. TCU is approximately 270 miles northwest of the Rice campus in Houston. The Frogs open at home Saturday against Jackson State.
Karlgaard said he also heard from officials at Baylor and SMU offering help.
"It's nice to know you have such good colleagues in the state," Karlgaard said.
Del Conte is a former Rice athletic director. TCU coach Gary Patterson coached together with current Rice head coach David Bailiff on the same staff at New Mexico in 1996.
Bailiff coached under Patterson at TCU from 2001-2003.
"I want to thank the staffs at TCU, SMU, Baylor and UTEP who all reached out to offer whatever help we needed," Bailiff said in a statement. "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."
The University of Houston is in a similar situation because of the flooding. The entire program will remain in Austin, Texas practicing until at least through Tuesday.
The Cougars open Saturday at Texas-San Antonio.
