HOUSTON, TX – Scott Abell surmised after his first conversation with Rice athletic director Tommy McClelland that he was the right man for the job. The Owls were looking for a head coach with a unique offense and a history of winning at prestigious academic institutions without much history of success and Abell checked every box. 

Football was Abell’s first love growing in Virginia as the son of a dairy farmer and the youngest of three boys. He says his dad hauled around more athletic equipment than farm tools in his youth. Abell, 55, played football, baseball, and basketball as a prep star, eventually choosing a scholarship in baseball at Longwood College as a catcher and eventually drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 1992. 

“I don’t think my dad ever regretted taking over the family dairy farm, but he certainly didn’t want it for us,” Abell said of he and his two older brothers, who both also played college athletics and pursued a career in coaching. “He woke up at 2 a.m. every morning and never had a day off. This profession is easy in comparison.” 

Abell spent two years in the minor leagues before getting cut by the Royals and returning home to Virginia to pursue a life as a high school teacher and coach. His first job was as an offensive coordinator for a ninth-grade team. He hadn’t developed an offensive identity yet, but he called the play-calling bug and never looked back. 

Abell dedicated himself to studying Tom Osborne and the option attack he deployed as the head coach of Nebraska. Abell needed an edge as he became a first-time head coach at the age of 27 for a Liberty High School program that was 0-10 and lacking talent. The option provided his squad an equalizer. By Year 3, Liberty won a district championship and Abell earned the job at nearby Amherst High School, which he led to back-to-back state titles. 

“At Amherst is where I learned that marrying the option with great athletes leads to an elite offense,” Abell said. “At Liberty, it provided us an equalizer. At Amherst, I probably could’ve run any offense and won, but by then, I was committed to running the ball out of an option attack.” 

Abell was still running a triple-option under center like the dominant Nebraska teams of the 1990s when Division III Washington and Lee called with an offensive coordinator offer in 2008. He turned down the offer initially because he was returning 18 starters to an Amherst squad that had lost just one game over the last three years. A month later, Washington and Lee called again. This time, Abell accepted. 

Now a play-caller in college, Abell began to expand his offensive horizons. He began studying spread concepts and enjoyed the idea of inside zone and the zone read. The offensive staff at Washington and Lee visited FCS program Wofford in 2009 because Abell heard offensive coordinator Wade Lang was dabbling with the option from the shotgun formation. 

It was love at first sight for Abell. He returned to Washington and Lee convinced that he found his offense. While Wofford mixed in the shotgun formation with the typical under-center option look, Abell and Washington and Lee were all-in on the idea of running the triple option away from under the center. Abell never looked back. 

“That move was career changing for me. There is no other way to describe it,” Abell said. “In my last 15 years of coaching at Washington and Lee and at Davidson, we’ve led the country 10 times. It allowed us to be more creative and to open the passing game while keeping guys healthy. And the kids we were recruiting were playing in shotgun formations. It all just made too much sense.” 

Abell was elevated to head coach at Washington and Lee in 2012 and won three Old Dominion Athletic Conference titles over six years at the helm. He moved onto his next challenge in 2018 when he accepted the job at Davidson, which like Washington and Lee is one of the top academic colleges in the country. He won two Pioneer Football League championships and reached the FCS playoffs three times in seven seasons in charge. 

Abell and his wife, Crissie, made a pact decades ago when it became clear that her husband was pretty good at the coaching thing. They never wanted to accept a job in a city that they couldn’t visualize raising children in and the new opportunity needed to be one that Abell saw as a potential destination. So, when Rice called with interest in a coach just like Abell, he began to do his own research. 

“By the time we had our last interview, I knew Rice was a place for me,” Abell said. “I don’t see the high academic standards as challenges, I see them as opportunities. Using the great reputation of what Rice is to our advantage to attract great scholar athletes here, and that’s been the formula at my two previous stops.” 

Abell met with 82 players on the Rice roster on his first day on the job to focus on roster retention and then went to work recruiting. He honored every Rice commit to the previous staff and relayed to the current Owls that his goal wasn’t to turnover the roster like so many first-year coaches in modern football. That’s not Rice, and it sure isn’t Abell. He’s still a high school coach at heart who won’t shy away from leading. 

“That’s how I think we build this,” Abell said of maintaining his roster and adding from the high school ranks inside the state of Texas. “There are a lot of things that we need to do, but one of the first things is getting back to recruiting good high school players, especially from this state, on daily basis. The talent here is undeniable.” 

Coaching at Rice can sometimes feel like the Mike Tyson quote about having a plan until someone hits you in the mouth. But Abell believes. Mostly because he’s already proven his recipe at similar stops. He’s not the head coach at Rice because he worked for Nick Saban or Bill Belichick. He earned the job by winning at places not used to victories.

Rice is one of those schools. The Owls haven’t won at least eight games or a bowl since 2014. They’ve won 10 games or more twice since 1949 and only three times in school history. Ken Hatfield ran the option with varying degrees of success while on South Main in the 1990s. It is now Abell’s turn to zig where others have zagged in a Lone Star State obsessed with throwing the football. 

“When the announcement happened, I’d imagine two questions were asked: Davidson plays football and who is Scott Abell?” he joked from his new office overlooking Historic Rice Stadium. “I’m okay with that. But I’m here because I’ve won. I’ve won everywhere – at places where people struggled to find the right answers.”