Rudy Gutierrez/El Paso Times
UTEP football coach Sean Kugler often says that the mark of a good football team is when the different units, offense, defense and special teams, start feeding off each other, picking each other up, raising each other's level of play.
At this point, the Miners are about the opposite of that. A week after the defense utterly imploded against Oklahoma and drug the offense down with it, the offense showed it could do the same against Rice.
The result was a 31-14 loss in the Conference USA opener on a dreary night where UTEP failed to string good possessions together.