Following in AgAlum’s comments, a big theme was much of the recruiting cycle success was retention - the Connor twins, Simonson, Nova. And, almost all the coaching staff is back. He also mentioned that the vultures will be out in April trying to lure Rex away and how it’s a priority of the collective to help him hold to his commitment to stay.

I find Plough’s comments about the positive parts of NIL (Bain’s opportunity, recruiting tool) refreshing. Sounds like they helped Bains find a great landing spot AND helped set up a financial plan to help set him up for his post football life.

ESPN shows us as 4.5 favorites. We also have to be aware of other guys and how that affects seeding. I think, in addition to winning tonight, we root for Bako, Fullerton and Poly to lose. Although. We might want a POLY victory tonight (we do have a tie breaker over them). And root for USCD and Irvine the rest of the season (they are secure as top 2). A top 4 seed doesn’t seem in the cards with our schedule, so I’m shooting for 5-6.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but we didn’t see Roberson on the road trip after his cameo vs Hawaii. That’s a bummer

I thought the $2.5M was to be used toward the $5M FBS application?

are you guys going to the signing event Wednesday?

I was just curious about our attendance over the past dozen or so years. I got this from the NCAA site:

year average
2010 1,748
2011 1,668
2012 1,736
2013 2,027
2014 1,712
2015 2,584
2016 2,111
2017 2,178
2018 2,117
2019 1,834
2020 1,440
2021
2022 730
2023 1,248
2024 1,529

big drop in 1440 was due mostly to the preseason (we had 2 or 3 game with 600 or so fans) that wasn't very success (we lost 6 road games in a row). 2021 had no fans, and 2022 was the weird crowd restriction year. Last year, we started getting back to pre-pandemic values. We right around 1500 this year, which will probably go down after this long road trip (especially if our record isn't good).

we could really benefit from having 2-3 vocal student leaders. I noticed that UCR had several students standing in front of the student section leading cheers and that's the best student turnout i've ever seen at UCR. We need 2 Darius Livingston's out there to get the students going......rest of the fans follow suit. The band has been more and more vocal the past couple game so hopefully that builds.

We've played Thursday-Saturday BWC games for as long as i can remember. That's not a change.

I hope he’s successful - sac needs better facilities. But the SDSU situation where you have a well established FBS that was drawing pretty well in a market that just lost their NFL team seems different than Sac’s very hazy FBS future. I’m not sure students will hop on the bandwagon so that they MIGHT get more out of state students.

was he the SDSU president at the time?

Looking back over the years, our attendance was typically in the 1700/game range pre-pandemic; the past couple years were down in the 1300 range. 2014-15 was the outlier year when attendence was around 2500/game. That was the conference title team and we had 3 huge attended games (ESPNU vs Poly that drew 5300, ESPNU vs LBSU that drew 5300 and season ender vs Irvine that drew 4400).

Student turnout hasn't changed much over the past 10 or so years that I have been regularly attending. They fill the section up on a regular basis once the season rolls into January. Those ESPN games were always a big draw but those aren't happening anymore. Also, the band turnout this year has been bigger in number and in participation than it has for many years. It seems like the pandemic years took alot of steam away from the program.

at Davis, the Beach shot 65% from beyond the arc -> 30% above their season average. there's a big drop off in scoring from Askew's 21 point per game, so I will assume Les will design something to slow him down. This is a critical game for us. A win on Thursday sets us up for a possible sweep vs Fullerton on Saturday. A road sweep would put us in pretty solid position above the bottom half of the conference. A loss would put the Beach in a strong position to finish above us.

I think this is about par for the course although this year’s football success brought out a bunch more new posters.

don’t forget UCLA has to pay Cal $10M a year. There’s a story today by Jon Wilner about the ACC media deal snd the hosing that Cal and Stanford agreed to out of desperation. The unknown is that the ACC might pay out differently to FSU, Clemson, Miami and UNC due to their higher profile - more hosing!

Add to it the article earlier in the week about the grind the 4 cross country road trips are for basketball and this doesn’t seem sustainable.

if they can sign a deal with NBC, more power to them. UCONN and UMASS get decent basketball money, probably an order (or two) of magnitude more than Big Sky basketball money.

We just don’t match up with the eaters. Bigger, and deeper and they play as tough a defense as anyone. Wish we had that last 19 seconds vs Riverside back!

Feels like it slipping away a bit. Lax on defense and sloppy on offense.

Turner is SO MUCH MORE INTENSE vs us than any other team

If a team goes independent , do they get any media rights monies?

I’m watching in the background with a houseful of grandkids. Seemed like Irvine ramped up the defensive pressure after the T. 12 fouls for us vs their 5.

Vegas doesn’t like our chances - 12.5 point underdogs. Very tough matchup. I think I’d like to see Poly, Bako, Beach and Fullerton lose as expected to keep them below us (plus we have 2 win tiebreaker over UCSB)

we did have a TO; we used it after they hit the 3. By a guy who was scoreless up to that point!