Kind of funny that there's two crappy teams that most of the average teams have beaten up on. Davis, Northridge and Hawaii all beat both of the bad teams. Santa Barbara, Long Beach and Riverside each beat one of them. That's one positive for Bakersfield as they haven't played either one yet. Will be interesting to see how those middle teams shake out.

I don’t remember if all the games were on ESPN+ in years past.

This year there were game available on network TV though. The final, both semis and I believe 2 of the QF as well. That might not be what you meant though.

Good to see the ratings were up this year. I wonder what the ratings would have been had they played it at 10:30 our time on Saturday before the NFL started, but regardless, it was a good idea to not have it on Sunday to conflict with the NFL.

Is their schedule that tough? They get South Dakota St and Nevada. But in conference they miss Montana St and NAU, and they get both Montana and Idaho at home. I mean, who knows who will actually be good next year so we'll see.

2022 when they went undefeated they also missed Montana St (No.4) but they got Weber, Idaho, Montana and UC Davis and they won at 6-5 Northern Iowa and beat Colorado St by 31.

2021 was softer since they missed Montana St and EWU (both finished top-10).

I guess I just compare schedules to our 2022 team (faced the 1, 2 and 4 seeded playoff teams plus and Idaho team who made the playoffs and Cal) or our 2019 team (faced the 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 seeded teams, playoff teams in San Diego and North Dakota, and Cal). So everything is relative.

I didn't like it when combined with the decision to kick the FG to make it 14-3. If you're going to be conservative, then do that. If you're going to be aggressive, do that. But why kick the FG to make it 14-3 (which means you still need 2 TD's) on 4th and 3 but then go for it on 4th and 5 a few minutes later? And even if you're being aggressive, I agree that you probably still punt the ball knowing you get the ball to start the 2nd half. Get in to half down 14-3 and regroup (which they did).

Purdy was the next year. That draft was also awful, though at least evaluators got that one correct. Kenny Pickett was the only QB selected in the first 2 rounds. Second QB off the board was at #74.

Man this was looking like a blowout early but full credit to Montana St for battling back.

To be fair to Lance and the 49ers, that whole draft class of QBs was a disaster. Trevor Lawrence is the best of the bunch and that's basically by default. Zach Wilson, Lance, Justin Fields and Mac Jones were the other 1st rounders and all of them are on new teams already. And the 5 guys drafted after the 1st round have done nothing either.

Just a reminder that roughly 50% of the 1st round QBs are probably going to, at best, not turn out to be anything special.

The word "some" is doing some heavy lifting there. It was 40 pounds of weed.

That being said, I don't particularly care about weed all that much. Also got suspended from Bama for a violation of team rules and from Texas for damaging a parking boot.

Obviously we only know about what's been reported but I don't have much of an issue giving this kid a chance and keeping him on a short leash. If it had been harder drugs and assaulting a woman, that would be a different story.

https://questionnaires.armssoftware.com/4d4374292a6a

Recruiting questionnaire maybe? Not sure what's on there because I'm not going to create a profile. Have we announced a new coaching staff yet? On the women's soccer page, it still lists the former coach.

I'm assuming the thought process is to have it on it's own day, though even that they screwed up a bit. Last year it was on the final Sunday of the NFL season which was incredibly dumb. They probably should just do it on Saturday morning. There will be NFL games but not until 1:30 Pacific Time. Why not play it at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. PT? There's a bowl game that morning at 8 a.m. but I doubt many people would say "you know what, I really want to watch NDST vs MSU but Buffalo-Liberty in the Bahamas Bowl is on so I'm going to stick with that". There won't be any NFL games or Bowl games on Mon, Jan 6 so I assume that's why they picked it. But Saturday morning seems like a much better idea.

I'm really looking forward to the final. Hopefully it's a good one.

Kind of hoping MSU rolls here, though I'd prefer a close game for entertainment purposes. Would make me feel a bit better about last week in that we didn't miss a good shot at making the title game (like when we lost the EWU game in 2018 and missed out on a home game in the semis).

Probably not very attractive. I mean, Troy Taylor showed it was possible to have success there but they've been in the FCS since 1993 and 2019 was their first playoff appearance at that level. They also only made 1 appearance in the DII playoffs. Their media guide tells me only 2 of their head coaches have ever had a winning record. Prior to Taylor, the last time they won 8 games in a season was 1991. So 2019 was the first season in FCS that they won 8+ games.

So while Taylor showed you can win at Sac State, 6 other coaches have shown it's not an easy task at the FCS level.

https://www.fanatics.com/?query=uc%20davis&_ref=p-HP:m-SEARCH

Fanatics has some stuff too. And yeah, you're right that the online stuff on the UC Davis athletics store is lacking. I wanted to get a UCD polo shirt. On our online store, the only logo options were sport specific (i.e. UC Davis Football) or one with a script Davis.

But Fanatics had this one which was more what I was looking for: https://www.fanatics.com/college/uc-davis-aggies/uc-davis-aggies-champion-textured-solid-polo-navy/o-38+t-24585769+p-489820938398+z-9-1165597446?_ref=p-SRP:m-GRID:i-r5c1:po-16

You're the one who mentioned "let the subs close out the second quarter" in blowouts. Let's explore that. We had 2 games that were blowouts, like you said. The Illinois St game was a playoff game and also, only 28-10 after 3 quarters. Montana St was up 30-8 on us, we had the ball on our own 19 with 10:42 left and Montana St still had to stop a 2 point conversion to prevent that game from going into OT. So the other two games, you want the reserves to come in and play, what, one or two series in the second quarter? Throw 15-20 passes total between the two games? And you think that will help develop them for next year because they're playing against the starters for two teams who were a combined 4-19? That's not going to do much of anything, especially if you're splitting those throws up among two QBs. And playing them at the end of the game, almost no coach is going to say "hey I know we're up 49-10 or 52-0 entering the fourth quarter, but we're going to continue to run our hurry up offense and throw the ball just so we can get the reserves some experience". I understand the thinking, but it's not going to happen, even with the backups.

As for the two blowouts, the box score tells me Harper was the QB for our only two 4th quarter drives against Cal Poly. And against NCU, Harper came in for the drive that started with 3:58 left in the 3rd quarter. So the backups played nearly a quarter and a half. We actually played 3 backup QBs that day. Only 2 threw passes but I was at that game and remember a fourth QB coming in. So we did insert the reserves in the third quarter, exactly like you wanted.

The only way you're going to develop a QB is by letting them play consistently. Not by playing like 4 drives over the course of a season. And unfortunately, you can really only have 1 QB on the field at a time. This isn't RB where you can split carries or WR where you can spread the ball around. And really, they're probably going to develop better going against our defense in practice than they would going against an awful Poly or Northern Colorado team.

O'Hara had almost twice as many rushing attempts as he did passing attempts and rushed for more yards than he threw for in 2022. He might not have been a true wildcat QB (I'll take your word on this as I didn't watch any Sac games that year so I can't speak on how they ran their offense) but he certainly wasn't a passing QB. So they used Dunniway when they wanted to throw and O'Hara when they wanted to run what I assume was the read option or some variant and have the QB either run the ball or hand it to Skattebo. That's what I meant by specialized packages. Those two QB's had vastly different skill sets.

But it would have been crazy this year to take Hastings out for a couple series in the second quarter of a bunch of games to develop your next QB, which you would have to do if you actually wanted that QB to develop. Because throwing the backup out there once to throw 12 passes won't do anything.

I went with South Dakota St. Really just want three good games though.

Ok? I thought we were talking about QB's.

Lot's of teams give more carries/targets to star players and if they get hurt, well, that sucks. Not much you can do about it. Taking 5 carries and 3 targets per game away from Lan and giving them to someone else isn't all of a sudden going to make our offense look no different if Lan gets hurt.

It's also much easier to give multiple running backs carries than to give multiple QBs reps. For one, the RB's get tired and need a break.

If you use 2 QBs with any consistency, you either don't have a #1 QB or it's a situation where the second guy is coming in to run specialized packages like the Wildcat.

Montana St's QB threw 259 of 289 passes. The main backup had 1 game where he threw more than 4 passes and he threw 8.
South Dakota's QB threw 283 of 295 passes.
South Dakota St's QB threw 312 of 356 passes. One backup threw 25 (one game with 16, then never more than 4 in a game) and another 14 (never more than 4 in a game).
North Dakota St's QB threw 310 of 348. One backup threw 19 (one game with 15) and the other 16 (never more than 5 in a game).

How about the more prolific passing teams? Surely they'd want to develop a backup.

SE Missouri St's QB had the second most passing yards in FCS. He threw 618 of the 635 passes.
Monmouth's QB was third. He threw 435 of their 440 passes.
Abilene Christian's QB was fourth. His backup only played when he got hurt and threw 1 pass outside of those two games.
Incarnate Word's QB was fifth. He threw 528 of the 540 passes.