• Week 12: UC Davis (6-4) at Sac State (10-0)
    I’m assuming the numbers reported are tickets sold, not gate clicks. Curious what the redemption rate of tickets is because on TV we certainly didn’t look to be averaging 9000+. I’ve gone to games in the south. Students leave early there too if the game isn’t interesting. They are just usually in an end zone section so the cameras don’t catch it. Compared to the south (or Montana), Davis has low engagement from townies who are local but not alumni. Places like Baton Rouge, Tallahassee, Gainesville, etc come to a standstill on game day with everyone in town in the stadium (or partying in the parking lot if no ticket), or watching at a bar or house party.
  • 2022 FCS Playoffs
    Big Sky should should send Northern Colorado AD as the rep. Very little chance of a conflict of interest.
  • Week 12: UC Davis (6-4) at Sac State (10-0)
    I hope the Sac grounds team has tightened all the bolts. Last time Hornet stadium had this kind of interest (2000-ish?), part of the upper deck collapsed. I think that might have also been the first time I saw some classy sac state gals backed up to the urinals in the mens room.
  • Week 11: UC Davis (5-4) @ Idaho (6-3)
    I think the refs undies must be too tight or something. Also Tompkins has a pretty good Michael Jackson impersonation.
  • Week 7: Northern Arizona (2-4) @ UC Davis (1-4)
    maybe try the UC Davis box office in case that section was consigned to them.
  • Week 7: Northern Arizona (2-4) @ UC Davis (1-4)
    Glad to have the steam engine back, but the whistle seems a bit sickly at least on tv. Somebody needs to get some coals on the fire and get her steamed up for real.
  • Week 7: Northern Arizona (2-4) @ UC Davis (1-4)
    thanks for pointing out that “the 80’s” was 40 years ago. That hurt almost as much as when one of my employees told me his parents were my age.
  • Week 5: UC Davis @ Montana State
    Dan Hawkins’ haircut quality seems to be inversely related to his coaching quality. As the barbering has gotten better the scoring has gotten worse. Too much time at the salon maybe?
  • Will the Dobbs decision affect woman’s athletes?
    I did not realize either how much medical autonomy athletes sign away. Perhaps the military is the only other profession that gets away with that. I had wrongly assumed I suppose that team medical care was mostly focused on athletic related injury/prevention. I was surprised by how much coaches seem to be able to be involved in medical decision-making. While I think most UCD coaches have students best interest in mind, I wouldn’t say the same for Jim Harbaugh types. I know with my employees I have to expressly tell them not to talk to me about their medical conditions for liability reasons, that their doctor needs to talk to the company doctor and all I need to know is what accommodations are agreed upon. As far as what conversations and transportation are legal or not, there is so much untested in court from 1930s laws suddenly reawakening. But elite programs often skirt the law and get away with it when accountability would cost too much, for example Florida State and the team hookers hired by the boosters. All that said, the tone of the article and indeed the national conversation focuses on, shall we say, the Sunday morning regret for Saturday night’s indiscretion scenarios. But there are many other scenarios, ectopic pregnancies, partial miscarriage, infection, inducing a stillbirth, etc. that are really not “choice” related which now fall into a legal grey area.
  • Will the Dobbs decision affect woman’s athletes?
    I don’t have a WaPo subscription, but idk how much this will affect recruitment. FWIW, I think this concerns both men and women. My gut tells me 18yo recruits are likely still most motivated by the allure of playing time, success, campus amenities, and more recently NIL opportunities. Do some people choose states based on other things like restrictions around guns, alcohol, voting, cannabis, etc? Probably some, but probably not most. Probably Northern Colorado would be better and Weber would be worse if that were a big factor. I would venture that at the elite programs, there are boosters who will quietly provide transportation, whether it be a female athlete or male athlete’s girlfriend. Perhaps more complicated will be the inevitable schedule gymnastics of “can’t use university funds to travel to X state” declarations and pressure from both sides on where championships may be held that we saw with the bathroom bill saga.
  • Why didn't Barriere get drafted?
    I won’t debate EB3’s athleticism, but the NDSU matchup was probably the most NFL-like defense he ever faced. He was sacked 5 times and only led scoring drives in the first quarter. Scott Marsh loved to call him multifaceted, but IMO he was really a one trick pony, that trick being exploiting time dancing around in the backfield. His long ball isn’t that accurate especially when under pressure and when you have a corn fed defense that won’t let you take forever to develop a play, he’s out of tricks. In the NFL you can’t run backwards 30 yards and expect to have a positive yard play very often.
  • Idaho State Assistant coach arrested on murder charges
    The real question is not how he ended up at Idaho State, but how he didn’t end up at EWU, given Aaron Best’s desire to have some thug life in his locker room.
  • UC Davis Health Stadium getting new turf
    In my era my favorite was always the script “Aggies” ripple bow at the end of Roll. Love the hand drawn shows. We also had some rudimentary software written by a bandsman in the 90s to help plot shows and print poop sheets. After the drum major created everything it could run a simulation for collisions and either declare the show as “sane” or “insane”
  • Graduation cut short, 7 taken to the hospital
    absolutely somebody needs to fired. Don’t know who, but total incompetence.

    In reading more, the decision to move to the stadium was actually made well before the pandemic. The reasons stated by the university were fewer, larger ceremonies would allow them to procure bigger name speakers, the Pavilion was struggling to schedule everything with a growing number of ceremonies from the professional schools, and a larger venue would allow more tickets per student. The unstated reason was the chancellor having to give 9 addresses over 3 days.

    While I appreciate the chancellor apologizing and accepting responsibility—the first time I’ve seen a UCD admin even partially own a mistake, it was ultimately inadequate and of questionable sincerity. Students are saying the communication about the Saturday (2nd) ceremony was conflicting and changing right up to the start of the ceremony, with mumblings from volunteers that the chaos campaign was intentional to dissuade people from coming so they could speed up the ceremony. Other students noted they were only allowed 4 tickets, instead of the 6+ typical at the pavilion. And others questioned how it was ever realistic to have a 2 hour ceremony with 2500 names when the Pavilion ceremonies lasted 2+ hours with only 700 names.
  • Graduation cut short, 7 taken to the hospital
    this is at least the 3rd if not 4th turf to go down is Aggie Stadium. It seems artificial turf actually has kind of a short lifetime (maybe the intense heat contributes?). If you factored all of the inputs, I’m kind of curious on the overall environmental impact of artificial turf vs well-managed Bermuda.
  • Graduation cut short, 7 taken to the hospital
    I didn’t realize it had been happening for 34 years. I guess it has been kind of a niche event not widely publicized. From what I gather there were a half dozen or so minority groups that held such events this year. I will say that I don’t really understand the purpose of these events, but unto each their own.
  • Graduation cut short, 7 taken to the hospital
    This sounds like a grade A fudge up, and one that was predictable for anyone who lived through the opening of Aggie Stadium. I can appreciate the challenges of the Pavilion, namely it has become too small for commencement unless you do at least 6 ceremonies (maybe a tough sell for the admins who have to go to all of them), plus add in makeups for 2020 and 2021 boosting numbers. I can also appreciate that some people, maybe grandparents especially, being apprehensive about being in a sold out indoor venue. If this was going to outdoors in June, it should have been under the lights. Or they should have rented Golden 1 Center for the capacity. Historically Davis has read names, but maybe it is time to consider other ways. For example, Stanford does a stadium ceremony with a kind of informal walk in, the speeches, and then they dismiss everyone to small stages setup all over campus on lawns and lecture halls where each department has a more intimate ceremony to read names. Also, maybe time to abandon commencement speakers. We may remember how long they talk but rarely what they say. As far as banning water, I’ve been to several UCD commencements and never remember smuggled booze being a problem. Sounds like a solution searching for a problem.
  • Aggie Launch Day and Aggie EVO
    EVO seems like a good program that should be available to everyone. One of the challenges with UCD is its sheer size and can be very impersonal if you don’t find your way into some sort of smaller connected cohort and I can relate to the “now what” feeling as senior year winds down. My experience in Letters and Sciences was that it was very difficult to build relationships with faculty and college staff unless you had some sort of marketable personal story like digging wells in Africa without hands or whatever. And it seemed like the internship and career center wasn’t nearly as interested as they were in engineering and bio sciences students. So the idea of building accessible connections with alumni and employers in a broad range of areas who kind of have ordinary professions rather than just the “change the world” types that make it into UCD Magazine seems noble. High schools peddle this lie that good jobs come looking for you if you go to a good university. That may be reality for a few fields, but for many fields the diploma is not as convincing on its own as you’ve been led to believe and you to have to have additional marketable skills and experience to be competitive.
  • 'Elite' UC Davis mascot ousted, replaced with cow
    I don’t often accuse Mrak Hall of being reasonable, but thank goodness reasonable minds prevailed here. This exercise was a dumb waste of resources. Now ASUCD can get back to the important things like organizing sit-ins to demand a Punjabi major and free organic tampons in the mens restrooms (both real by the way).
  • 'Elite' UC Davis mascot ousted, replaced with cow
    This is a circular issue. 12% voter turnout is considered “well above normal”. Because ASUCD types waste their oxygen on nonsense like this or debating the finer points of BDS in regards to hypothetical assets they don’t have. People don’t vote because the proposals are nutty, but it leaves just enough space for the nutty crowd to push their agenda as if they have some sort of majority mandate.