You wouldn’t know it now, but Houston, Texas’ Rice Stadium once was one of college football’s great venues. It seated over 70,000 fans in an era when 70,000 was a huge crowd. It also hosted Super Bowl XIII.

Mostly, Rice Stadium was home of the Rice Owls, who had a winning tradition that disappeared like the water on Mars. That tradition now is encapsulated into a grainy highlight from the 1954 Cotton Bowl, when Rice routed Alabama 28-6, and it shows a Tide player so desperate to prevent another score that he ran off the bench to tackle Rice’s Dickie Maegle, who was streaking down the sideline.

Rice Stadium today may rate as the priciest piece of barely used real estate in Houston. The Owls, who haven’t known good times in 30 years, are fortunate if only two-thirds of the stadium’s seats are empty on an autumn Saturday afternoon. The place stands now as a monument to lost greatness, like some gridiron Angkor Wat.

The fate of Rice Stadium should be relevant to Vanderbilt athletic director Todd Turner, because men’s hoops at Vandy are in danger of going the way of Owl football. Over the past decade—it seems hard to believe it has been 10 years since Vandy won the SEC title under Eddie Fogler—much of the old magic has seeped out of Memorial Gym. On most nights, much of the old crowds are gone, too.

Encroachment by professional sports explains in part, but only in part, why Vanderbilt no longer can routinely fill Memorial’s 14,000-some-odd seats. The Commodores’ failure to reach the NCAA Tournament more than once in the past decade, and to knock off highly rated opponents as they traditionally did, explains much more.

During Jan van Breda Kolff’s tenure, many Vandy fans came to see that failure as only temporary. In Kevin Stallings, they believed they had found a coach who would lead them back to the promised land. And, sure enough, in Stallings’ first two years, Memorial showed signs of life. The ’Dores picked off a few ranked teams. Even settling for postseason NIT bids seemed palatable to many, given the team’s rash of injuries and shortage of players.

This year, with its core intact and some talented freshmen on board, an NCAA bid with an 8 or 9 seed looked like a reachable star. Next year, when the entire squad would return, promised to be the season when Vandy again could aspire to something big.

Of course, if you count flops, this year’s bunch has already achieved big. But their collapse was not inevitable. After all, this was a squad that could have beaten Michigan and Connecticut, two teams that will join the field of 64. They did beat Alabama and Georgia, and they came within a missed layup of beating Florida in regulation.

Yet this same team has won only one other SEC game, lost to bottom-feeding Arkansas and South Carolina while mounting little fight on their home floor and put up only token resistance in a 62-point loss at Kentucky, the worst drubbing a Vanderbilt team has suffered in more than 50 years.

Increasingly, fingers are pointed toward Stallings. Boos, too. Those haven’t been aimed at a Vandy coach since Richard Schmidt in 1981.

Stallings says his players haven’t quit on him (except in Lexington), and he’s probably right. But it’s fair to wonder whether the opposite is true.

Maybe it’s just that he can’t hide his frustration, but from the outside peering in, Stallings looks like a guy who could use a long vacation in Hawaii. After one particularly dispiriting loss this season, he wondered aloud whether someone else could do a better job. His boss right now has to be wondering the same thing.

Something else has to be weighing on Todd Turner’s mind, too. If things don’t turn around soon, and the crowds keep dwindling downward, the Fenway Park of college basketball could be slowly transforming into Rice Stadium.

Last week, the Predators did two things that had never happened before in the franchise’s five-year history. They were two games over .500 in March, and they printed up a batch of playoff tickets, just in case.

They established a league record, too. Barry Trotz became the longest tenured first coach of any NHL expansion team. The former coach whose record he broke, by the way, is team broadcaster Terry Crisp.

If they can capture a playoff berth—they entered the week five points behind Edmonton for the final spot in the Western Conference—don’t be surprised to see owner Craig Leipold accompanying Gnash down a rope from the rafters before the start of Round One’s third game. Except perhaps for his accountant, no one will be more excited than Leipold, who won’t have to make good on his “Playoff Pledge” to refund this year’s increase in season-ticket prices if the team failed to advance to the postseason.

But the sudden playoff fever around town, though low-grade (and, frankly, still a little surreal-sounding), obscures something possibly much larger: Somehow, during the past couple of months, the Predators have become a good, steady hockey team.

Consider the following evidence. As of Monday, they had lost only once in their last 12 outings. In February, they recorded their first two shutouts of the season. At least until the injury to David Legwand, their offense was much improved.

They’ve performed well in tough venues. They rallied from three goals down in Joe Louis Arena to tie Detroit. They stole a tie in Toronto. Last week, they stopped Dallas, which owns one of the best home-ice records in the league.

Now, it’s tempting to believe that the Predators have turned a corner. Sure, they’ve had good stretches in other years. But this one is the longest, and the one in which the Preds have played the best and most consistently—at a pace that qualifies them, strange as it sounds, as one of the NHL’s hottest teams.

Their progress seems all the more improbable because their first two months of this season were utterly abysmal, thanks to injuries and a string of tight losses. Had they won just half of those games, much less performed at their present clip, a playoff berth would be nearly assured. Ironically, it wasn’t until many locals wrote off the season and stopped paying attention that the Preds made their move.

Exactly when that move started isn’t easy to pin down. Maybe it began when GM David Poile traded goalie Mike Dunham to the Rangers. That deal allowed Tomas Vokoun to become the everyday netminder, and his play has been outstanding.

Or maybe two impressive victories over strong teams in late December and early January—one a thumping of the Stars, followed by a riveting win over Ottawa—built confidence that has fueled the team ever since.

Then again, it may just be that a young team is growing up. If so, it will be vindication for Poile, who staked everything on the faith that youth would be served.

It was a strategy that required management to beg for patience from fans—and has sorely tested that of the coaches, who watched ill-timed mistakes cost them game after game. But this slow road to prosperity also recognizes a fundamental truth: More so than basketball, baseball and maybe even football, hockey demands a whole team of quality players, not just a couple of superstars.

In hockey, those who don’t start don’t just sit. They’re on the ice almost as much as the stars. Poile clearly has hoped his team will experience a big bang, in which a crop of young stars—Vokoun, Legwand, Scott Hartnell, Adam Hall—might all be born together.

Even if the Predators don’t make the playoffs this year (still an iffy proposition), it’s looking more and more like Poile’s patience is being rewarded. Maybe the best way to a bright future was to go starless after all.